lpGBT: Low-Power Radiation-Hard Multipurpose High-Speed Transceiver ASIC for High-Energy Physics Experiments

Commissioning of detector systems for the high-luminosity large Hadron collider (HL-LHC) is scheduled to take place between 2026 and 2028 at CERN. Application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for those systems have been in intense development over the past ten years. Some of those ASICs, as is the case of the low-power gigabit transceiver (lpGBT) described in this work, have now been produced in industrial quantities and have been fully qualified for operation in the HL-LHC environments that require, where the innermost detectors are concerned, radiation hardness over 1 MGy. The lpGBT is a multifunctional device, enabling data transmission between the off-detector and the on-detector systems. Data can be transmitted from the detector at 5.12 and 10.24 Gb/s and to the detector at 2.56 Gb/s. It implements data rate-configurable electrical links to communicate with the front-end ASICs and low-speed serial and parallel buses for experiment control. A set of analog functions for monitoring and control of the physics detectors is also included. This article describes the functionality and the architecture of the lpGBT ASIC and reports on its radiation hardness characterization.