Transcript No Slide Title

ALICE INDUSTRIAL AWARD
to STMicroelectronics
for its collaboration to the ALTRO Chip
ALTRO, one of the world’s most advanced Data
Acquisition System-on-Chip for the ALICE Experiment
The ALICE Experiment involves high energy collisions between various types
of heavy ions. In order to study the tens of thousands of resulting particles
created by a single collision,
the ALICE Collaboration is building a
sophisticated detector (the Time Projection Chamber, or TPC) containing
nearly 600,000 tiny sensors, each capable of responding to the presence of an
individual electron. The signal from each of these sensors must be amplified,
converted to digital format, and pre-processed by the front-end electronics,
which is located deep underground on the Time Projection Chamber.
One of the most critical challenges in designing the
TPC was to minimize the size and power
consumption of the front-end electronics beyond the
present capability of the integrated circuits (ICs)
commercially available. This challenge motivated the
development of an dedicated IC (Aplication Specific
Integrated Circtuis, or ASIC) that embeds in a single
chip the circuits to digitise, process, compress and
store the information of a high number of channels.
ALTRO CHIP
The result is ALTRO (ALice Tpc Read Out) chip, which integrates in a single
chip 16 low-power Analogue-to-Digital Converters (ADC) plus more than 6
millions transistors of digital processing circtuitry and around 800 kbits of data
memory.
The Result of 4 Years of Development
4cards
16 ch
4 PQFP 100
8 SSOP 28
20 mm
135 mm
24 mm
Integrated ADCs
1998
1999
2001
CHANNELS / CHIP: 1
CHANNELS / CHIP: 4
CHANNELS / CHIP: 1
POWER / CH: 120mW
POWER / CH: 80mW
POWER / CH: 16mW
PRICE / CH:
PRICE / CH:
PRICE / CH:
50CHF
8CHF
5CHF
ALTRO has been developed in three
steps: 1) the first implementation was
entirely
based
on
commercial
components (1998); 2) in 1999 the first
attempt to miniaturize the circuit was
done developing a 4-channel ALTRO,
but still with external ADCs; 3) the
design and the prototype of the final
version of the ALTRO chip were
accomplished in 2001.
About STMicroelectronics
STMicroelectronics, the world’s third largest semiconductor
company, is a global leader in developing and delivering
semiconductor solutions across the spectrum of microelectronics
applications. An unrivalled combination of silicon and system
expertise, manufacturing strength, Intellectual Property (IP) portfolio
and strategic partners positions the company at the forefront of
System-on-Chip (SoC) technology and its produtucts play a key role
anabling today’s convergence market.
Production site in Crolles (France)
STMicroelectronics
has
made
available to the ALICE Collaboration
one of its most advanced circuits
(TSA1001).
This
circuit
was
integrated into the ALTRO chip
designed by the CERN PH-ED
group. About 50,000 ALTRO chips
have been produced in site of
Crolles (France) with the 250nm
CMOS process.
The ALTRO chip
In one single chip, the analogue signals from 16 channels are
digitised, processed, compressed and stored in a multiacquisition memory.
The Analogue-to-Digital
converters embedded in
the chip have a 10-bit
dynamic range and a
maximum sampling rate
of 40MHz.
ALTRO ARCHITECTURE
The ALTRO Design Team (CERN – PH / ED)
ALTRO CHIP LAYOUT
After digitisation, a pipelined Data
Processor is able to remove from the
input signal a wide range of
perturbations, related to the nonideal behaviour of the detector,
temperature
variation
of
the
electronics, environmental noise,
etc. The signal is then compressed
by removing all data below a
programmable threshold, except for
a specified number of pre- and postsamples around each peak.
Eventually data is stored in a multi-acquisition memory that has a
readout bandwidth of 300Mbyte/sec. The chip, is implemented in
a 0.25mm CMOS technology, has an area of 64mm2 and a power
consumption of 320mW.
From left to right: Luciano Musa (Project Leader), Antonio Jimenez, Raul Esteve and Bernardo Mota
On 19 June 2002, the ALICE Collaboration assigned the
first industrial award to ST Microelectronics for the
excellent collaboration in the design and production of
the ALTRO chip.
STMicroelectronics made available to the ALICE
collaboration the design of one of its most advanced
circuits (TSA1001). This was integrated into the ALTRO
chip designed by the CERN PH-ED group.