RF Electronics

For many decades High Energy Physics (HEP) instrumentation has been concentrated on detectors of ionizing radiation -- where the energy of incident particles or photons is sufficient to create mobile charge in gas, liquid, or solid material, which can be processed by front end electronics (FEE) to provide information about the position, energy, and timing of the incident radiation. However, recently-proposed HEP experiments need to sense or control EM radiation in the radiofrequency (RF) range, where ionization detectors are unavailable. These experiments can take advantage of emerging microelectronics developments fostered by the explosive growth of wireless data communications in the commercial sector. Moore's Law advances in semiconductor technology have brought about the recent development of advanced microelectronic components with groundbreaking levels of analog-digital integration and processing speed. In particular, RF "System-on-Chip" (RFSoC) platforms offer multiple data converter interfaces to the analog world (ADCs and DACs) having bandwidths approaching 10GHz and abundant digital signal processing resources on the same silicon die. Such devices eliminate the complex PC board interfaces that have long been used to couple discrete ADCs and DACs to FPGA processors, thus radically reducing power consumption, impedance mismatch, and footprint area, while allowing analog preconditioning circuits to be eliminated in favor of digital processing. Costed for wide deployment, these devices are helping to accelerate the trend towards "software defined radio" in several high-volume commercial markets. In this whitepaper we highlight some HEP applications where leading-edge RF microelectronics can be a key enabler.