ASIC survival in the radiation environment of the LHC experiments: 30 years of struggle and still tantalizing

Abstract

The radiation environment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) poses an unprecedented challenge to the reliable functionality of the electronics components composing the detector systems. Starting from the beginning of the 90s, a large effort has been dedicated at CERN and in the collaborating institutes to develop, produce and deploy Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) tolerant to all types of radiation effects: Total Ionizing Dose (TID), Single Event Effects (SEE) and Displacement Damage (DD). This article briefly describes the approaches and methodologies that the High Energy Physics community developed or adopted for that purpose over the last 30 years.