Contributions to testing and characterization of electronic devices with applications in Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments

The LHCb forward spectrometer will undergo modifications to allow operation in the second LHC long shutdown of all subsystems at 40 MHz acquisition rate. A flexible software-based trigger system will take full advantage of this increase in luminosity. Both RICH sub-detectors will be redesigned and the photodetection systems use the faster MaPMT sensors. Frontend and digital electronics inside photodetection elementary cells will benefit from new ASIC and FPGA devices. An irradiation campaign was initiated to evaluate the radiation hardness of semiconductor devices considered for this upgrade. Current work presents radiation hardness studies made in support of this program. Automated test bench configurations were implemented for the irradiation tests and the data analysis is performed to highlight the radiation tolerance of: the 28 nm HKMG Kintex-7 FPGA and for two 0.35 µm AMS BiCMOS ASICs named MAROC3 and SPACIROC2. In proton and heavy ion beam tests we map the operation parameters in order to qualify the device sustainability in the radiation mixt-field environment within detector. Effects caused by total ionizing dose (TID) have been measured, the Single-Event Effects (SEE) classified and counted, and we investigated possible error mitigation methods to reduce SEE. All this was extrapolated to the RICH expected environment where for more than 7000 h of effective LHC operation the radiation level including a safety factor is estimated to be: 200 krad TID, flux of 1.2 x $10^{12}$ high energy hadrons (HEH)/cm$^2$ and 1 MeV neq fluence is expected to be 3 x $10^{12}$ neutrons/cm$^2$.