LOCx2, a low-latency, low-overhead, 2 × 5.12-Gbps transmitter ASIC for the ATLAS Liquid Argon Calorimeter trigger upgrade

In this paper, we present the design and test results of LOCx2, a transmitter ASIC for the ATLAS Liquid Argon Calorimeter trigger upgrade. LOCx2 consists of two channels and each channel encodes ADC data with an overhead of 14.3% and transmits serial data at 5.12 Gbps with a latency of less than 27.2 ns. LOCx2 is fabricated with a commercial 0.25-μm Silicon-on-Sapphire CMOS technology and is packaged in a 100-pin QFN package. The power consumption of LOCx2 is about 843 mW.