Abstract
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest and most powerful in the world, started in 2008 and is the last stage of CERN's accelerator complex. The LHC consists in a 27-kilometer ring of superconducting magnets allowing to accelerate two beams up to 7 TeV before colliding them at 14 TeV in one of the five experiments monitoring the result of the collision. The LHC allowed notably the discovery of the Higgs boson and other baryonic particles predicted by the standard model. The radiation environment of the LHC and its injection lines is composed of different particles over a large spectrum of energies, from GeV level down to meV level (e.g. thermal neutron). The electronic equipment operating in such a harsh radiation environment, mostly based on Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) components, can experience failures induced by radiation effects. The criticality of the equipment can be very high, in the best case, the failure of a control system can lead to a beam dump, which can drastically the availability of the beam for science and in the worst case, the failure of a safety system can lead to the destruction of part of the machine. The new upgrade of the LHC planned for 2025, the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) will achieve an annual luminosity five time higher than the current version of the LHC. Consequently, the levels of the radiation generated by the operation of the machine will also drastically increase. With such high radiation levels, a significant number of COTS-based systems will be exposed to radiation levels they cannot withstand. This will imply to either design more robust tolerant COTS-based systems and/or substitute preventively systems before their end of life. Thus, while in the previous years the Single Event Effects (SEEs) where the dominant cause of failure, in the future, cumulative radiation effect will as well become a major preoccupation. While a huge effort has been done in the past on the qualification process against SEE-induced failures, the qualification process for cumulative radiation effects, remained mostly unchanged. The aim of this work was, therefore, to investigate how the CERN’s Radiation Hardness Assurance (RHA) could be improved to respond to this new challenge and ensure that no system failures will impact the LHC operations. This involved several activities; (i) the study of the particularities of the LHC radiative environment and its impact on the components and systems exposed to it, (ii) the study of the suitability of current qualification methods and the development of approaches adapted to CERN’s needs and (iii) the study of reliable system lifetime estimation methods.