A radiation tolerant gigabit serializer for LHC data transmission

In the future LHC experiments, some data acquisition and trigger links will be based on Gbit/s optical fiber networks. In this paper, a configurable radiation tolerant Gbit/s serializer (GOL) is presented that addresses the high-energy physics experiments requirements. The device can operate in four different modes that are a combination of two transmission protocols and two data rates (0.8 Gbit/s and 1.6 Gbit/s). The ASIC may be used as the transmitter in optical links that, otherwise, use only commercial components. The data encoding schemes supported are the CIMT (G-Link) and the 8B/10B (Gbit-Ethernet & Fiber Channel). To guarantee robustness against total dose irradiation effects over the lifetime of the experiments, the IC was fabricated in a standard 0.25 μm CMOS technology employing radiation tolerant layout practices.