Upgrading the ATLAS Tile Calorimeter electronics

Abstract

The Tile Calorimeter (TileCal) is the hadronic calorimeter covering the central region of the ATLAS experiment at LHC. Its main upgrade will occur for the High Luminosity LHC phase (phase 2, which is foreseen for 2022-2023), when the peak luminosity will increase 5-fold compared to the design luminosity (1034cm2s−1) at a proton beam energy of 7 TeV. An additional increase of the average luminosity with a factor of 2 can be achieved by luminosity leveling. The upgrade aims at replacing the majority of the onand off-detector electronics so that all calorimeter signals are digitized and sent by optical fiber to the off-detector electronics in the counting room. To achieve the required reliability, redundancy has been introduced at several different levels. Three different options are presently being investigated for the front-end electronic upgrade. Which one to use will be decided after extensive test beam studies. 10 Gbps optical links are used to read out all digitized data to the counting room while 5 Gbps down-links are used for synchronization, configuration and detector control. For the off-detector electronics, a pre-processor is being developed, which takes care of the initial trigger processing while temporarily storing the main data flow in pipeline and de-randomizer memories. One demonstrator prototype module with the new calorimeter module electronics, but still compatible with the present system, is planned to be inserted in ATLAS this year, i.e. mid 2014 (at the end of the phase 0 upgrade).