Development of Radiation-tolerant Components for the Quench Detection System at the CERN Large Hadron Collider

This works describes the results of a three year project to improve the radia- tion tolerance of the Quench Protection System of the CERN Large Hadron Collider. Radiation-induced premature beam aborts have been a limiting factor for accelerator availability in the recent years. Furthermore, the fu- ture upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider to its High Luminosity phase will further increase the radiation load and has higher requirements for the overall machine availability. Therefore equipment groups like the Quench protection groups have used the last years to redesign many of their systems to fulll those requirements. In support of the development of radiation- tolerant systems, several proton beam irradiation campaigns were conducted to determine the inherent radiation tolerance of a selection of varied elec- tronic components. Using components from this selection a new Quench Protection System for the 600 A corrector magnets was developed. The ra- diation tolerance of this system was further improved by developing a lter and error correction system for all discovered failure modes. Furthermore, compliance of the new system with the specication was shown by simulating the behavior of the system using data taken from the irradiation campaigns. The resulting system is operational since the beginning of 2016 and has in the rst 9 months of operation not shown a single radiation-induced fail- ure. Using results from simulations and irradiation campaigns the predicted failure cross section for the full new 600 A Quench Protection System is 4.358 ± 0.564 · 10−10cm2 which is one order of magnitude lower than the target set during the development of this system.