Characterization and quality control test of a gigabit cable receiver ASIC (GBCR2) for the ATLAS Inner Tracker Detector upgrade

TL;DR

This paper details the design, characterization, and quality testing of the GBCR2 ASIC, a high-speed gigabit cable receiver for the ATLAS detector upgrade, demonstrating compliance with performance and power specifications.

Contribution

It introduces the GBCR2 ASIC prototype, including its design, testing procedures, and high yield, advancing the development of reliable high-speed data transmission for particle detectors.

Findings

Total jitter of 129.1 ps (non-retiming) and 79.3 ps (retiming) for uplink channels.

Power consumption below 174 mW for all channels.

97% yield in quality control testing of 169 prototypes.

Abstract

We present the characterization and quality control test of a gigabit cable receiver ASIC prototype, GBCR2, for the ATLAS Inner Tracker pixel detector upgrade. GBCR2 equalizes and retimes the uplink electrical signals from RD53B through a 6 m Twinax AWG34 cable to lpGBT. GBCR2 also pre-emphasizes downlink command signals through the same electrical connection from lpGBT to RD53B. GBCR2 has seven uplink channels each at 1.28 Gbps and two downlink channels each at 160 Mbps. The prototype is fabricated in a 65 nm CMOS process. The characterization of GBCR2 has been demonstrated that the total jitter of the output signal is 129.1 ps (peak-peak) in the non-retiming mode or 79.3 ps (peak-peak) in the retiming mode for the uplink channel and meets the requirements of lpGBT. The total power consumption of all uplink channels is 87.0 mW in the non-retiming mode and 101.4 mW in the retiming mode, below the specification of 174 mW. The two downlink channels consume less than 53 mW. A quality control test procedure is proposed and 169 prototype chips are tested. The yield is about 97.0%.