The Selection of a radiation-tolerant DAC for the LHC (Part I: Bipolar technology)

Abstract

The control system electronic of the LHC cold mass will require the use of 12-bit parallel input data converters and they must tolerate the radiation that will be generated by the particle beam. In this paper, we show the radiation tests on some DAC’s built in bipolar technology. During the irradiation, the offset & gain error and the relative number of bits were on-line measured. A brief description of the measuring system will be shown. After the deactivation of radioactive isotopes, the consumption and the frequency behaviour were checked. All these data were used to select the DAC which will be employed in the control of the LHC cold mass.

In the next paper, the results when testing CMOS converters will be shown.