Radiation-Hardened Chips Power CERN Accelerators

Building Electronics for High-Radiation Environments

Electronics are at the core of almost any technology invented in the past decades. As the world digitalizes even more processes and data, this is becoming more true every day.

However, in some environments, standard electronics struggle to keep up. One of these is particle accelerators.

On one hand, particle accelerators generate so many terabytes of data per second that ultra-efficient electronic components are needed to keep up. On the other hand, the amount of radiation they generate tends to scramble electronic systems.

Scientists at the CERN in Switzerland were faced with this dilemma. At the LHC particle accelerator at CERN, the world’s largest, radiations were emitted, making measurement difficult.

“We tested standard, commercial components, and they just died. The radiation was too intense. We realized that if we wanted something that worked, we’d have to design it ourselves.”

Rui (Ray) Xu, a Columbia Engineering PhD student

The first chip of this kind was developed in 2017 and put to the test in 2022 for the ATLAS experiments. ATLAS is the largest particle detector ever built, at 46 meters (150 feet) long and 25 meters (82 feet) in diameter.

The detectors contain 100+ million sensitive electronic channels to record the particles produced by the collisions. It contains many sub-detectors, each playing a separate role, to detect at the same time photons, electrons, muons, pions, etc.

Source: ATLAS

A second chip, the data acquisition ADC, has recently passed its final tests and is now in full production. It is fully described in a recently published paper¹ in the journal IEEE Explore, under the title “A Radiation-Hard 8-Channel 15-Bit 40-MSPS ADC for the ATLAS Liquid Argon Calorimeter Readout”.

How Radiation Affects Electronics

Since the dawn of electronics, it has been known that radiation tends to damage electronic components and/or make them give out the wrong data.

Among the many effects radiation can have, the most problematic ones can be quickly listed:

• Variation in voltage in transistors, leading to either erroneous data or outright destruction of the transistors.
• Flipping individual bits (0 &1) in memory components.
• Electrical or thermal burnout of integrated circuits.
• Damage to optical detectors and light emitters can either destroy them immediately or reduce their lifespan.

This is a serious problem in high-radiation environments, like space, medical accelerators (radiation therapy, radiography), or nuclear facilities.

One option to solve the issue is simply to use enough shielding, putting the electronics part behind a protective layer, usually water or a heavy element like lead, depending on the type of radiation.

Another option is redundancy and error correction. If a component is in multiple copies, or a program runs several times, an error in only one of them can be detected and subsequently ignored.

The last option is to build electronics systems that are naturally resistant to radiation, which is the only option for electronic systems that have to be directly exposed to radiation, like the detectors of a particle accelerator.

Building Radiation-Proof Electronics

Commercial Viability

The problem the CERN engineers and scientists faced is that off-the-shelf components simply can’t survive the harsh conditions inside the accelerator.

At the same time, the market for radiation-resistant circuits is too small to entice investment from commercial chip manufacturers.

“Developing state-of-the-art instrumentation is crucial to our success. Industry just couldn’t justify the effort, so academia had to step in.”

John Parsons – Professor of physics and leader of the Columbia University team working on the ATLAS detector.

In this specific case, the researchers needed to develop analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). These devices’ task is capturing electrical signals produced by particle collisions inside CERN’s detectors and translating them into digital data that researchers can analyze.

This is done through a device called a liquid argon calorimeter, which converts particle collisions into an electronic signal.

Columbia’s ADC chips convert these delicate analog signals into precise digital measurements, capturing details that no existing component could reliably record.

Demanding Conditions

The researchers carefully chose and sized components and arranged circuit architectures and layouts to minimize radiation damage, as radiation shielding is not realistic in the particle detector.

Not only that, but they had to take into account that the electronic boards in question are inaccessible during operation and can be accessed for maintenance at most once per year.

The radiation levels the components will experience in a 12-year operating lifetime are typically encountered by satellites in geostationary orbit.

Temporary errors can be tolerated, but permanent damage cannot be accepted, as it would hinder the work of all the research projects requiring ATLAS.

Reusing Proven Semiconductor Manufacturing Techniques

Reinventing how to produce semiconductors was not going to be a viable path to create a useful device within a reasonable budget and time frame.

So the researchers used commercial semiconductor processes validated by CERN for radiation resistance and applied innovative circuit-level techniques.

A key decision in that respect was to rely on older, tried and tested lithography methods, using a commercial, triple-well 65-nm CMOS process for production of the ASIC custom chip (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit).

This 65 nm process is known to be inherently radiation hardened.

Another design choice was to minimize the components not directly present on the chip, reducing the risk of errors by integrating the chip’s internal clocks, memories, etc.

Source: IEEE Explore

However, calibration calculations are done off-chip to prevent radiation-induced errors in the calculation that would give erroneous data.

They also looked at capacitors, which can be overcharged by the ionizing effect of radiation.

Metal-insulator-metal (MiM) capacitors are naturally 30x-80x thinner than a more conventional metal-oxide–metal (MoM), while also being half the size, reducing the surface potentially hit by radiation and high-energy particles.

Source: IEEE Explore

Final Chip Design & Testing

The final chip is an electronic design specifically designed to be optimal against radiation, instead of high-speed, ease of manufacturing, or boosted performance like commercial products.

In total, 45,617 of these chips will be used in the ATLAS detector.

Source: IEEE Explore

Eighteen devices were characterized for analog performance; further validation of long-term analog accuracy and an extensive radiation testing campaign was undertaken.

All results indicated that the chips would perform well in the environment of the ATLAS detector.

Still, no matter how hardened, these levels of radiation will cause some errors and problems in any electronic systems. So the researchers then built digital systems that automatically detect and correct errors in real time.

Double- and triple-bit errors, which are more problematic, are detected by periodically reading back all memory registers and comparing them to the initial programming. Any measurement taken when such double and triple errors occur is also discarded.

Conclusion

This research project will enable the advanced analysis of high-energy particles generated by the LHC.

It will also be a vital component of a major upgrade of the accelerator with the “High Luminosity LHC” (HL–LHC), an upgrade intended to boost the luminosity of the LHC by 10x.

For example, the High-Luminosity LHC will produce at least 15 million Higgs bosons per year, compared to around three million from the LHC in 2017.

Source: CERN

It is likely that later CERN’s projects, like the Future Circular Collider (FFC), with first experiments starting in the mid-2040s, will also require similar or even more advanced radiation-proof electronics.

Lastly, this sort of project, funded through academic budgets in fundamental physics, can be an inspiration for a commercial version of radiation-proof electronics.

As mankind is looking to explore deep space, including potentially permanent lunar and Martian bases, or asteroid mining, more durable and radiation-proof electronics will be very useful.

Investing in Advanced Sensors

CEVA is a sensor company and a partner with CERN to use the institution’s algorithm to improve the efficiency and power consumption of its sensors. CEVA solutions and IP (200 patents) are integrated into 18 billion devices.

The company’s solutions are used by many of the leading electronic brands worldwide.

Source: CEVA

The main application of the collaboration between CEVA & the CERN is “Edge AI”, or artificial intelligence applications deployed on devices away from the data centers (the cloud) and closer to the consumers (the edge).

It may not be surprising to see particle physics algorithms being reused in AI applications, as neural networks were, for example, used in finding the Higgs boson particle. Analyzing particle accelerator data needs to be done on-site instead of in the cloud, due to the sheer volume of data produced very quickly.

CEVA helped CERN create new compression algorithms that can be used in future experiments and will be able to integrate this new technology into its products.

“Thanks to our collaboration with CERN, we were able to develop an innovative approach that enables the networks to run up to 15x faster compared to 16-bit baseline models.

It’s enhancing network speed and reducing energy consumption by up to 90% while maintaining comparable accuracy.”

Olya Sirkin – Senior Deep Learning Researcher at Ceva

This is but one of CEVA’s technological progresses, with the company active in wireless connectivity, sensors (vision, audio, motion), and neural network algorithms.

Source: CEVA

CEVA greatly benefits from the combined trend of 5G connectivity (including satellite 5G) and IoT (Internet of Things) with embedded AI solutions, both for industrial and home solutions. It is also a leader in WiFi 6 solutions and has a leading position in WiFi 7.

Source: Ruije

As a software and IP company, CEVA is well-known among engineers and is often missed by investors interested in the IoT and 5G sectors.

It can be an interesting company at the very edge of technological progress in data processing and edge AI, as illustrated by CERN’s selection of it to help with some of the most complex data analyses ever performed by mankind.

Latest CEVA (CEVA) Stock News and Developments

Study Referenced:

^{1. Rui Xu; Jaroslav Bán; Sarthak Kalani; Chen-Kai Hsu; Subhajit Ray; Brian Kirby. A Radiation-Hard 8-Channel 15-Bit 40-MSPS ADC for the ATLAS Liquid Argon Calorimeter Readout. IEEE Explore. 28 May 2025. pp 180 – 199 DOI:10.1109/OJSSCS.2025.3573904}