LaRA EED - Research Facility Overview

The Laboratory for Radiation and Aging Effects in Electronic Devices (LaRA EED) is hosted by the Department of Elementary Particle Physics (DFPE) of the Horia Hulubei National Institute for R&D in Physics and Nuclear Engineering (IFIN-HH). In this laboratory embedded systems and experimental benches are developed and implemented in order to support high energy physics experiments at particle accelerators and cosmic space applications. Research interest is mainly focused on radiation hardness qualifications of sensors and complex integrated circuits. The reliability of the electronic devices in harsh radiation environment is investigated during tests in particle beams at various external facilities. For end-applications with specific radiation background the behaviour is extrapolated based on data registered before, during and after irradiation. The research infrastructure in the laboratory, consisting of hardware and software tools, and measurement and control instrumentation, allows the personnel to fully design and implement experimental benches for radiation hardness assessment and thus enrich the experience in well defining monitoring strategies to be applied to the devices under test. Recent solid experience was gained by evaluating Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) and Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technologies from the perspective of mixt-field radiation environment encountered in Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments. Further expertise was obtained in testing and qualifying optical sensors for single-photon counting. For example, we used a custom locally built light-tight enclosure with associated electronics for the multi-anode photomultipliers (MaPMT) performance evaluation and aging studies - more details details available here.

LaRA EED has a space dedicated to PCB design and micro-assembling (left-hand side picture below) and another one for long-term testing under ESD conditions (see right-hand side photos below).
PCB design and assembling location   Long-term testing location

Here is a tentative summary of the test and measurement instruments available at the laboratory: CNC machine for double sided PCB milling; soldering and desoldering stations for THT, SMD, LGA, BGA device packages; high-speed waveform generator; high-performance digital oscilloscopes; bench multimeter and power supplies, handheld digital instruments, logic analyser and FPGA development boards. There is also a full range of software tools for PCB design, circuit simulation, FPGA firmware development, graphical user interface development, data analysis and interpretation.

Deliverables obtained using the research infrastructure

Journal papers

Conference Talks and Posters

News

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