Electronics for Instrumentation in Nuclear Science

Dear Colleagues,

The design of instrumentation for Nuclear Science, including experiments in Nuclear, Particle, and Astroparticle Physics is a very active field of research. Very often it is necessary to use state-of-art techniques to design systems with special features, which are driven by the extreme requirements of the experiments. The production volumes normally range from tens of units, in space and in other niche experiments, to thousands of units, in large experiments at hadronic and leptonic colliders. As far as it concerns digital components, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are usually the preferred solution due to the lack of non-recurrent engineering costs and turnaround time. Latest-generation FPGAs integrate hundred thousands of registers and look-up-tables, equivalent to millions of logic gates. They embed dozens of high-speed serial transceivers exceeding 30 Gbps per line. Most FPGA families are also reconfigurable, even after the final deployment in the system. Their processing capabilities and their flexibility pushed the use of reconfigurable FPGAs also to mild-radiation areas, e.g. on outer detectors of experiments at particle accelerators. This required the development of complex firmware-level mitigation techniques against radiation effects. Moreover, recently, deep and machine learning techniques have started being implemented in FPGAs for real-time applications.

Other the other hand, application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) have been and still are a key technology for on-detector applications Nuclear Science. The main reasons are:

1. possibility to perform analog signal conditioning and implement mixed-signal functions in a single device;
2. small physical size, which make them compatible with the tight space constraints of detectors, e.g. in pixel vertex detectors. Small custom ASICs can often be positioned closer to sensor to reduce input capacitance and improve noise performance;
3. low power dissipation, which is required to reliably power and cool down on-detector electronics;
4. extreme radiation tolerance, as experiments at colliders normally require total ionization dose (TID) tolerance from few Mrads to 1 Grad (as for example at the Large Hadron Collider) and immunity against single event effects (SEEs);

The aim of this Special Issue of Instruments is to collect contributions focused on advancements in applications of modern programmable logic and application specific integrated circuits to any field of Nuclear Science. Manuscripts describing novel techniques and/or the implementation of systems for real-time data conversion, acquisition, processing, and transfer are welcome. Topics of interests include, but are not limited to, the following aspects:

• trigger and data acquisition systems (TDAQ): novel architectures deployed in machines and particle detectors but also conceptual designs for future applications;
• real-time data processing: novel techniques for feature extraction, data compression, signal processing and their implementation;
• time to digital converters (TDCs), analog to digital converters (ADCs), digital to analog converters (DACs): novel architectures, implementations in ASICs and FPGAs, and their applications in experiments or machine control;
• fast serial links for data transfer, trigger and clock distribution: architectures for data transfers from few units to several tens of Gbps per transmission line;
• applications in radiation environments: including particle detectors, accelerators, and instrumentation in space, and mitigation techniques for radiation effects;
• machine and deep learning for real-time applications: methods and algorithms and their hardware implementation.

Dr. Raffaele Giordano
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Instruments is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• FPGAs
• real-time
• radiation
• TDAQ
• fast links