Filters and Redundancies: An Exploration of Novel Coherent Noise Filters for High Energy Physics

TL;DR

This paper explores radiation-tolerant noise filtering algorithms for high-energy physics ASICs, comparing redundancy techniques like TMR and TTMR to optimize fault tolerance, area, and power consumption.

Contribution

It introduces novel median-finding algorithms with redundancy methods tailored for radiation tolerance in high-energy physics ASICs.

Findings

BWMF is efficient in area and power with simple TMR.

Full TMR increases power consumption significantly.

TTMR provides reliable fault tolerance with balanced area and power.

Abstract

This work presents radiation-tolerant implementations for the SALSA front-end readout ASIC through redundancy methods applied to two median-finding algorithms designed for coherent noise suppression. Bit-wise Median Finder (BWMF) and Combinatorial Sum Median Finder (CSMF) were implemented in TSMC \SI{65}{\nano\meter} and evaluated in terms of area, power, and latency. Three redundancy techniques were applied in this work to compare their impact: simple TMR, full TMR, and temporal TMR (TTMR). The simple and full TMR approach was applied in both algorithms to establish comparisons and TTMR was applied to CSMF as an improvement. The results indicate that the BWMF achieves efficient performance in terms of area and power under the simple TMR scheme, but exhibits significantly higher power consumption when using the more robust full TMR approach. The TTMR technique, in turn, offers reliable fault tolerance while maintaining a feasible balance between area and power.