Evaluation of commercial ADC radiation tolerance for accelerator experiments

Electronic components used in high energy physics experiments are subjected to a radiation background composed of high energy hadrons, mesons and photons. These particles can induce permanent and transient effects that affect the normal device operation. Ionizing dose and displacement damage can cause chronic damage which disable the device permanently. Transient effects or single event effects are in general recoverable with time intervals that depend on the nature of the failure. The magnitude of these effects is technology dependent with feature size being one of the key parameters. Analog to digital converters are components that are frequently used in detector front end electronics, generally placed as close as possible to the sensing elements to maximize signal fidelity. We report on the development of a technique for testing analog to digital converters for radiation effects, in particular for single event effects. A total of seventeen commercial ADCs were evaluated for ionizing dose tolerance and extensive SEU measurements performed on a twelve and fourteen bit ADCs. Mitigation strategies for single event effects (SEE) are discussed for their use in the large hadron collider environment.