ATLAS rewards two pixel detector suppliers

Peter Jenni, ATLAS spokesperson, presented the ATLAS supplier award to Herbert Reichl, IZM director, and to Simonetta Di Gioia, from the SELEX company.

Two of ATLAS’ suppliers were awarded prizes at a ceremony on Wednesday 13 June attended by representatives of the experiment’s management and of CERN. The prizes went to the Fraunhofer Institut für Zuverlässigkeit und Mikrointegration (IZM) in Berlin and the company SELEX Sistemi Integrati in Rome for the manufacture of modules for the ATLAS pixel detector. SELEX supplied 1500 of the modules for the tracker, while IZM produced a further 1300. The modules, each made up of 46080 channels, form the active part of the ATLAS pixel detector.

IZM and SELEX received the awards for the excellent quality of their work: the average number of faulty channels per module was less than 2.10-3. They also stayed within budget and on schedule.

The difficulty they faced was designing modules based on electronic components and sensors that were imposed by the experiment and supplied by other companies. The two suppliers demonstrated great flexibility. Very few companies in the world were capable of performing such highly specialized work under the conditions required by the ATLAS experiment. In responding to the challenge, IZM and SELEX used two different methods.

SELEX used a process involving indium deposits followed by thermo-compression, while IZM opted for the electrolytic deposition of Pb/Sn. Both techniques allowed the strict characteristics required by ATLAS to be met. SELEX worked in close collaboration with the Genoa and Milan INFN groups, while IZM collaborated with the University of Bonn.