LAUSR

The increased particle collision rate following the upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to an increased luminosity requires an increased readout data speed, especially for the ATLAS pixel detector, located closest to the particle interaction point. For this reason, during the Phase-II upgrade of the ATLAS experiment the output data speed of the pixel front-end chips will be increased from 160 Mbps to 5 Gbps. The increased radiation levels will require a radiation hard data transmission link to be designed to carry this data from the pixel front-end to the off-detector system where it will undergo optical conversion. We propose a receiver utilizing the concept of Decision Feedback Equalization (DFE) to be used in this link, where the number of filter taps can be determined from simulations using S-parameter data from measurements of various customized cable prototypes under characterization as candidates to function as transmission medium between the on-chip data driver and the receiver of the link. A dedicated framework has been set up in Matlab to analyze the S-parameter characteristics for the various cable prototypes and investigate the possibilities for signal recovery and maintained signal integrity using DFE, as well as pre-emphasis and different encoding schemes. The simulation results indicate that DFE could be an excellent choice for expanding the system bandwidth to reach required data speeds with minimal signal distortion.