High-Efficiency Digital Readout Systems for Fast Pixel-based Vertex Detectors

Particle physics is one of the science branches which heavily relies on most advanced technologies due to the increasing complexity of the problems it has to face. In future colliders, luminosities and beam energies are scaling upwards. These are necessary conditions for the discovery of new physics which both result in a larger amount of data that need to be brought out of the detector. That’s why one of the crucial points for new experiments is the evolution of data acquisition systems. Data acquisition systems employed in particle physics experiments followed the global technology trend and moved towards digital electronics and transmission lines, in this chapter we will describe how the effort of our work has been applied in this direction trying to extend digital processing on the very front-end of the detector. We will show how digital elaboration on the very front-end can help coping with new stringent requirements. One possible scenario for the discovery of new physics is the chance to investigate with high-precision some apparently known processes instead of brutally scaling the s energy foreseeing to achieve the threshold for new heavy particle discovery. High luminosity ee accelerators can provide clean signals at very fast rates in order to provide in a reasonable amount of time the required statistics for high-precision new physics investigations. The next-generation flavour factories are aiming at luminosities up to 10cms (refer to SuperB Collaboration (2007)) which imply a very high particle rate especially in the first layer of the innermost detector: the vertex tracker. This perspective opened new challenging researches for the realization of very fast and efficient sensors and readout electronics capable to take advantage of these super-luminous facilities. In this chapter we would like to present our works on data acquisition chains, which is focused on the front-end side of the detector but involves also external DAQ boards. We will show how we have expanded digital signal processing of a classical DAQ systems outside the walls of the counting rooms to the front-end chips. What we present is far from being a complete and definitive DAQ for a tracker design, but it provides viable solutions and technicalities for what concern the readout electronics world. The front-ends targeted by our data acquisition system are silicon sensors and, in particular, wide matrices of pixels. The huge improvements of the last decade in the world of the silicon industries, and the new technology processes that emerged recently, have stimulated the curiosity of the scientific community. Several types of pixel sensors for particle physics