Short history
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First microelectronics activities in Turin started in the early '90s with contributions of the Giancarlo Bonazzola's group to the development of the front-end electronics chip named FABRIC [1] devoted to the readout of the silicon strips of the NA50 experiment at CERN. The first chip prototype entirely designed using local resources only, named TOA16 (a 16 channels chip for the read out of silicon microstrip detectors for particle tracking) has been produced in 1994. Systematic design activities began in 1995 with the development of the front-end electronics for the Silicon Drift Detector (SDD) of the ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) apparatus at CERN and of the electronics for medical dosimetry within the TERA hadrontherapy foundation.
References
FABRIC and CPD
FABRIC chip (Wladyslaw Dabrowsk, Giancarlo Bonazzola)
- full-custom bipolar bipolar process by Tektronix
- 64 channels (one channel per strip)
- binary readout
- analog amplification/shaping + DISC (hit/no hit)
CPD (Clock Driven Pipeline) chip (Joel DeWitt) [2]
- CMOS
- RAM-based digital readout for FABRIC outputs
Design and testing of fast, low-power, low-noise amplifier-comparator VLSI circuits 1992
Radiation hardness measurements on components of a full custom bipolar process 1993
[1] Fast bipolar front-end for binary readout of silicon strip detectors 1993
W. Dabrowski, G. Bonazzola, P. De Remigis, P. Giubellino
http://cds.cern.ch/record/261878/files/ppe-94-055.pdf
[2] A pipeline and bus interface chip for silicon strip detector read out 1993
J. DeWitt
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/224271964_A_Pipeline__Bus_Interface_Chip_For_Silicon_Strip_Detector_Read-out
A fast high-granularity silicon multiplicity detector for the NA50 experiment at CERN
Radiation damage of silicon strip detectors in the NA50 experiment
DEVELOPMENT OF THE SILICON MULTIPLICITY DETECTOR FOR THE NA50 EXPERIMENT AT CERN
The OLA chip
Technology: SHPi full-custom bipolar process by Tektronix
OLA, A low-noise bipolar amplifier for the readout of silicon drift detectors 1995
W. Dabrowski, W. Bialas, G. Bonazzola, V. Bonvicini, F. Ceretto, P. Giubellino, M. Idzik,
M. Prest, L. Riccati, N. Zampa
Low-noise monolithic bipolar front-end for silicon drift Detectors 1999
W. Bialas, G. Bonazzola, W. Bonvicini, L. Casati, F. Ceretto, P. Giubellino,
M. Prest, L. Riccati and N. Zampa
Design and operation of a fast high-granularity silicon detector system in a high-radiation environment 1998
TERA 1.0
http://totlxl.to.infn.it/NewSite/vlsi_chip.html
- CMOS 1.8 um technology
- 14 channels
Several version of the ASIC have been already designed and used since 1996.
Performances of a VLSI wide dynamic range current-to-frequency
converter for strip ionisation chambers 1997
G. Bonazzola, R. Cirio, M. Donetti, F. Marchetto, G. Mazza, C. Peroni and A. Zampieri