A high-speed driver for silicon photonics Mach-Zehnder modulator for high data-rate transfer of particle collision images in high-energy physics and in medical physics

All the High Energy Physics (HEP) experiments in modern accelerators can be seen as real-time imaging devices whose main target is the reconstruction of the trajectories of the particles generated directly in the beam interactions - e.g. interaction between proton-proton beams in the Large Hadron collider (LHC) at CERN - or in the decay of other particles. Silicon imaging sensors are segmented in pixel arrays (50 μm x 50 μm) and they are bonded to custom Front-End (FE) ASICs. The data rate generated amounts to hundreds of Gbps for each FE ASIC. Similar scenario characterized the array of detectors in nuclear medicine systems such as PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scanners. Within this scenario, the paper presents the L1-trigger processor, which acts as an image compression processor with a compression factor 40:1. The paper also presents the silicon photonic Mach Zehnder Modulator with the relevant high-speed driver to transfer the multi-Gbps data rate with a tolerance to radiation damage up to 1 Grad.