NEWS  2006

Electronics poster day mixed accelerator and experimental sectors

30 November 2006. The IT department had organised  a single afternoon poster session where all electronics engineers could present their work to their collegues. This show has attracted around 50 people and gave a nice mixture of projects from both the accelerator and the experimental sectors, something that does not happen often as each domain has their own conferences. TS-DEM presented their work and services on three panels with the themes: role of DEM, production processes and quality assurance.

DEM E-mail addresses

23 October 2006. To help handling requests, TS-DEM has had since 2003 generic e-mail addresses for all of its services except the PCB fabrication workshop. To guarantee a fast response time for the fabrication of printed circuit boards, we have now also created the addresss electronics-pcb-workshop@cern.ch.

Cadence symbols electronics-components-cadence@cern.ch
PCAD symbols electronics-components-pcad@cern.ch
Design office electronics-design-office@cern.ch
Assembly workshop electronics-assembly-workshop@cern.ch
PCB workshop electronics-pcb-workshop@cern.ch

Job offer: Assistent to the manager of the design office and assembly workshop - (offer closed: December 2006)

Take part in the production of electronics for the world's most famous particle physics laboratory!

 7 August 2006. Because of an increasing workload and to improve the services of the TS-DEM group, we have opened a post for an assistant to the manager of the design and subcontracting office.

The functions are:

  • participate in selection of subcontracting companies in the member states and audit these companies;
  • follow-up all stages of manufacturing (prototypes and batch);
  • organize and follow up the technical aspects of the projects entrusted to the design office;
  • check the design of modules under study in the design office such that they are conform with the specifications and respect manufacturing rules and check the technical feasibility with the designers;
  • check that the studies meet the requirements of specification and quality assurance plans;
  • follow and adapt procedures according to demand and technological developments;
  • distribute subcontracting work to the industrial support team.

The full job description and requirements can be found in CERN's e-HRT system.

Design office reinforced

DEM-BE adapts to increased workload 16 June 2006. To be able to handle the enlarged demand for PCB layout, DEM has increased the capacity of the electronics design office. For this reason its subcontractor has increased the Field Support Unit with one person who will bring in industrial experience.

Multi-layer in just three days!

Reduction of turn-around time may be needed for LHC completion 16 June 2006. We are happy to tell that we are now able to deliver 4 to 10-layer PCBs in only 3 days time. This will be useful in case of extreme urgency of which we can handle maximum two per week. Last year we had already reduced the urgent delivery times for single sided and double sided boards to just a single day and the "standard" urgent delivery for multi-layer circuits to six days. The table of delivery times is adapted accordingly.

DEMarche running team

17 May 2006. The DEMarche team arrived at the 40th place out of the 65 teams at the yearly CERN relay race. Having a mixed team (and hardly any training :-), we are very happy with this result. The specially made T-shirts with DEM's logo might have helped to arrive at this.

DEM made also the signs for the different stands at the event. Although hardly known, in fact DEM also makes stickers and other posting signs on various supports (metal, plastic, etc).

Moisture sensitive devices are now under total control in DEM assembly workshop

Oven to remove humidity from devices to prevent 'popcorning'

 12 May 2006. DEM decided to equip its assembly workshop with a drying oven to face new demands related to moisture sensitive devices. This oven is able to dry components but also electronic assemblies up to 400x400mm. As the the specialized components needed to assemble the prototypes are provided by the users, the workshop could not always know the sensitivity level of the components to be mounted nor how they were stored.

With the new oven the assembly workshop is able to guarantee its customers a safe assembly process regardless of the component storage and moisture sensitivity level by integrating a baking step in its process flow to remove moisture from the sensitive devices that are used on the modules.

By using the oven before rework, rework jobs are also safer now; so there is no risk to damage a component close to the one that you want to remove and replace. More information about moisture sensitive devices is available from the Surface Mount Technology Association.

DEMarche running team

11 May 2006. Every year the CERN Running Club organises a relay race around the CERN site. This year DEM will have its own mixed team (2 women, 4 man), called DEMarche. We'll be running against other famous teams such as the Powercuts, The Puffing Billies and Missing Energy.

After the race David Watts (a former DEM Fellow) will provide music with the band Pink Symbolic Stompers.

Pallets full of modules for CMS

The two square ICs have each 456 solder connections below them! 130 FEC-CCS modules ready to be shipped to CMS28 April 2006. TS-DEM has its own internal services for the fast production of small quantities and of prototype modules. For larger quantities in most cases DEM outsources the production to local or European industry. Each week DEM organises the production of over ten different projects.

The photos show the FEC-CCS board for the CMS experiment for which DEM has made the design and organised the production. The delivery time of these 130 boards (that will be used in the Tracker, ECAL, Preshower, Pixels and the RPC detectors) was five weeks. The 9U VME (36x34 cm) module contains 72 different types of components, of which 43 have been ordered by DEM. With an average delivery time of five to six weeks for components, ordering, collecting and verifying components has become a well-appreciated part of the services provided by DEM.

Industrial excellence is rewarded by CMS Gold Award

CMS tracker front-end hybrid

 

Gold awarded projects
 

used advice from DEM

 28 April 2006. As written in the Weekly Bulletin 14/2006, as part of the sixth annual ceremony to honour its top suppliers, the CMS collaboration presented awards to nine firms.

For the production and lamination of the tracker front-end hybrid circuits, Cicorel (Switzerland) was awarded with gold. By giving technical advice, TS-DEM has been able to make this project a success.

Hybrid SA (Switzerland) was honoured for component assembly and the testing of the tracker front-end hybrids. Because we worked with this company before for other projects, TS-DEM was able to give a positive feedback to CMS' question whether this company would have the level of technology as required by CMS.

DEM offers book to central library

3 April 2006. At the end of last year all design personnel of the electronics design office have followed a course on high-speed PCB design. Apart from the course notes, each person received his personal copy of the book "Tracés des circuits imprimés" written by Philippe Dunand. It's a practical book that shows for example why it is better to place a  feedback resistor in an amplifier circuit near the input and not near the output, why it is better for mixed analog/digital circuits to have a common ground plane and it tells how to create a very low capacitance input.

As TS-DEM believes the book contains also useful information for engineers, we have offered a copy to the CERN central library.  For a list of other books on electronics in the central library, have a look at the links at the bottom of the page "CERN Electronics".

Academic training on future detectors

Future generation of detectors are likely based on GEM and Micromega detectors developed by TS-DEM 10 March 2006. A series of lectures was given on LHC luminosity upgrade: detector challenges:

The upgrade of the LHC machine towards higher luminosity (1035 cm-2s-1) has been studied over the last few years. These studies have investigated scenarios to achieve the increase in peak luminosity by an order of magnitude, as well as the physics potential of such an upgrade and the impact of a machine upgrade on the LHC DETECTORS. This series of lectures covered the following topics:

  •  Physics motivation and machine scenarios for an order of magnitude increase in the LHC peak luminosity (lecture 1)
  • Detector challenges including overview of ideas for R&D programs by the LHC experiments: tracking and calorimetry, other new detector developments (lectures 2, 3 and 4)
  • Electronics, trigger and data acquisition challenges (lecture 5)

2005 in 4 images

 

 

2005 was a year of reorganisation
with a reinforcement of subcontracting services...

 

 

...to be able to handle the large amount of work

 

 

 

...for the LHC Exeriments and the Accelerators.
Including several large scale productions.

 

 

And we even managed to prepare new technologies
for the post-LHC era which comes soon!

 

Workshop on Micro-pattern Gas Detectors: status and perspectives

16 January 2006. In the past few years, spectacular progress was made in applications of GEM and Micromega detector technologies. As discussions have already started on the needs for LHC upgrade and for the future linear collider programs, the time has come to review the status, running experience and perspectives of these so-called 'micro-pattern gas detectors' in a one-day workshop. To better discuss the use of GEM and Micromega in the next generation experiments, an overview of the challenges of future colliders will also be given.

Note that TS-DEM has the only laboratory in the world where the base elements for this type of detectors are made.

The workshop will be held on Friday 20 January at CERN and will be introduced by Nobel Laureate Prof. G. Charpak

Micromega detector prototype for the future T2K experiment (photo: CEA Saclay)

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