Abstract
The measurement of the radiation levels is an essential requirement in the LHC and its injection lines in order to quantify radiation effects on electronics and provide a detailed knowledge of the radiation field. The radiation monitoring system for the electronics at CERN, the “RadMon'', was installed in critical areas where equipment is or will be placed. Issues experienced in the last years of Radmon operation, the obsolescence of a few fundamental components of the electronic board and the necessity to improve both the accuracy and the resolution of measurements led to the launch of a new design of the monitor.This work describes the architecture of the new RadMon (V6), its reliability in radiation environments and the strategy adopted to choose and qualify the sensors, used for monitoring the mixed radiation field of the LHC accelerators. The CERN guidelines were adopted to qualify the RadMon components under radiation in order to develop a new architecture both more tolerant to radiation and more versatile than that of the previous version. In this context, the challenges that radiation tests impose for measuring Single Event Effects (SEUs) on a complex mixed-signal component such as the Analog to Digital converter, led to the development of an innovative test technique, which will be described in this thesis.The reliability of the RadMon measurements strongly depends on the calibration of its sensors. The complex radiation environment of the LHC imposes a peculiar qualification process which will be described and discussed in this work for the RadFets (Total Ionizing Dose sensor) and the SRAM memories (High Energy Hadrons fluence sensor).The use of the RadFet in a mixed field radiation environment has been studied and analyzed by means of 60Co sources as well as proton beams at different energies.The RadFets have been re-calibrated by studying the dose rate, particle sources, temperature, annealing and fading effects as a function of the oxide thickness. Furthermore, thanks to the new architecture of the RadMon, new biasing configurations have been tested to improve the resolution.Two types of SRAM memories with technology nodes of 400 and 90nm have been tested and calibrated by following a strict qualification methodology which includes tests with protons in the range 30-400 MeV, and with neutrons from thermal energies up to intermediate energies (~14 MeV). The 90nm memory improves the accuracy and resolution of the hadron fluence measurement. Moreover, the simultaneous use of both types of memories permits an improvement on the accuracy of the thermal neutron detection with respect to the previous version, as a result of a procedure which will be detailed in this work.The efforts towards the improvement of the TID measurements resolution for the new RadMon lead to the research and study of a new type of dosimeter sensor: the Floating Gate dosimeter (FGDOS). The sensor embeds complex circuitry, thus a full radiation qualification was necessary. Mixed field radiation tests, 60Co and protons tests have been carried out in order to evaluate the performance and the possible issues of the sensor. In this context, an analytical model of the sensor was developed to prove that the floating gate structure can be used as charge yield measurement instrument at room temperature and at low electric fields.The radiation tolerance characterization of the hardware, the qualification and calibration process of the sensors have significantly improved the overall reliability and quality of the measurements of the new RadMon. These improvements turned it into a reference instrument for radiation monitoring of complex mixed fields, such as the one encountered in the LHC, its injectors chain, and other particle physics research centers, such as JLAB in US, J-PARC in Japan.