ALICE INDUSTRIAL AWARD for its collaboration to the ALTRO Chip to STMicroelectronics for its collaboration to the ALTRO Chip ALTRO, one of the world’s most advanced Data Acquisition System-on-Chip for the ALICE Experiment The ALICE Experiment involves high energy collisions between various types of heavy ions. In order to study the tens of thousands of resulting particles created by a single collision, the ALICE Collaboration is building a sophisticated detector (the Time Projection Chamber, or TPC) containing nearly 600,000 tiny sensors, each capable of responding to the presence of an individual electron. The signal from each of these sensors must be amplified, converted to digital format, and pre-processed by the front-end electronics, which is located deep underground on the Time Projection Chamber. About STMicroelectronics STMicroelectronics, the world’s third largest semiconductor company, is a global leader in developing and delivering semiconductor solutions across the spectrum of microelectronics applications. An unrivalled combination of silicon and system expertise, manufacturing strength, Intellectual Property (IP) portfolio and strategic partners positions the company at the forefront of System-on-Chip (SoC) technology and its produtucts play a key role anabling today’s convergence market. STMicroelectronics has made available to the ALICE Collaboration one of its most advanced circuits (TSA1001). This circuit was integrated into the ALTRO chip designed by the CERN PH-ED group. About 50,000 ALTRO chips have been produced in site of Crolles (France) with the 250nm CMOS process. One of the most critical challenges in designing the TPC was to minimize the size and power consumption of the front-end electronics beyond the present capability of the integrated circuits (ICs) commercially available. This challenge motivated the development of an dedicated IC (Aplication Specific Integrated Circtuis, or ASIC) that embeds in a single chip the circuits to digitise, process, compress and store the information of a high number of channels. ALTRO CHIP Production site in Crolles (France) The result is ALTRO (ALice Tpc Read Out) chip, which integrates in a single chip 16 low-power Analogue-to-Digital Converters (ADC) plus more than 6 millions transistors of digital processing circtuitry and around 800 kbits of data memory. The ALTRO chip In one single chip, the analogue signals from 16 channels are digitised, processed, compressed and stored in a multi-acquisition memory. The Result of 4 Years of Development 4cards 16 ch 135 mm 1998 CHANNELS / CHIP: 1 POWER / CH: 120mW PRICE / CH: 50CHF Integrated ADCs 20 mm 4 PQFP 100 8 SSOP 28 24 mm 1999 CHANNELS / CHIP: 4 POWER / CH: 80mW PRICE / CH: 8CHF 2001 CHANNELS / CHIP: 1 POWER / CH: 16mW PRICE / CH: 5CHF ALTRO has been developed in three steps: 1) the first implementation was entirely based on commercial components (1998); 2) in 1999 the first attempt to miniaturize the circuit was done developing a 4-channel ALTRO, but still with external ADCs; 3) the design and the prototype of the final version of the ALTRO chip were accomplished in 2001. The Analogue-to-Digital converters embedded in the chip have a 10-bit dynamic range and a maximum sampling rate of 40MHz. ALTRO ARCHITECTURE After digitisation, a pipelined Data Processor is able to remove from the input signal a wide range of perturbations, related to the non-ideal behaviour of the detector, temperature variation of the electronics, environmental noise, etc. The signal is then compressed by removing all data below a programmable threshold, except for a specified number of pre- and post-samples around each peak. The ALTRO Design Team (CERN – PH / ED) From left to right: Luciano Musa (Project Leader), Antonio Jimenez, Raul Esteve and Bernardo Mota ALTRO CHIP LAYOUT Eventually data is stored in a multi-acquisition memory that has a readout bandwidth of 300Mbyte/sec. The chip, is implemented in a 0.25mm CMOS technology, has an area of 64mm2 and a power consumption of 320mW. On 19 June 2002, the ALICE Collaboration assigned the first industrial award to ST Microelectronics for the excellent collaboration in the design and production of the ALTRO chip. STMicroelectronics made available to the ALICE collaboration the design of one of its most advanced circuits (TSA1001). This was integrated into the ALTRO chip designed by the CERN PH-ED group.