Track detection: an MCM approach

Abstract

Two proton beams each accelerated to 2OTevl collide with each other in the interaction region producing large number of subatomic particles. The tracks of these particles can be detected by scintillating optic fiber setup. When these particles cut across the scintillating fibers, they are excited. The light output of these fibers is converted into voltage pulses using photodetectors. The output of the photodetectors are used for track detection and identification. The collision takes place every 132ns. A new integrated circuit packaging structure coupled with a purely hardware system was needed to meet the high speed and best performance requirements for track detection of subatomic particles. Microprocessors cannot be used for this kind of problem, because a processor typically has to execute several instructions before it can do a particular task i.e a sequential operation. Even if a highly parallel approach is used with processors we have the problem of magnanimity. Due to the high 1/0 requirement and low complexity of computation involved in track detection, a processor is not the right choice. Hence a purely and highly parallel hardware approach is investigated. The structure developed eliminates one level of packaging and allows upto nine 'Trillion electron volts MCM' modules to be plugged into a large multilayer printed-circuit board using a zero-insertion-force connector system. The 1800 pins on the module, i.e 16200 pins per board and 32 such boards, will be the complete system. The delays, which are the niain performance issue, are given utmost care by eliminating all the unwanted capacitances and inductances. This research details the design and outlines the packaging for the track detection system. This approach can be used as a model for any other high speed applications which involves low computational complexity but high 1/0 requirements.