Characterization of low power radiation-hard reed-solomon code protected serializers in 65-nm for HEP experiments electronics

The availability of low-power, radiation-resistant components has an enormous importance in the development of the electronic systems for modern detectors in a High Energy Physics (HEP) experiment. This paper describes the characterization in terms of radiation effects of two serializer blocks within a high speed transmitter, prior developed with the objective of achieving a power consumption of less than 30 mW at the operating speed of 4.8 Gbit/sec. Within the first serializer, called “simple TMR”, a traditional solution, based on the hardware redundancy, has been implemented. In the second case a new architecture, less power consuming, called “code protected”, has been proposed. The tests previously performed shown an average consumption of ~30 mW and ~19 mW, respectively, for a bit rate of 4.8 Gbit/sec but do not fully clarify if the blocks are suitable for working under extremely high radiation levels. Hence, a deep radiation hardness investigation has been performed and presented here to confirm the availability of these blocks in a HEP electronic system. SEU sensitivities are measured and bit error rates better than 2 E-15 are obtained, confirming that the “code protected” solution assures reliable communications in HEP experiments environment with a smaller power consumption. These blocks have also been designed and tested to cope with a total ionizing dose of 100 Mrad over 10 years of operation.