LOW-POWER ADC WITH FAST ZERO SUPPRESSION FOR BALLOON-BORNE EXPERIMENT

The present article describes a transceiver VLSI chip for optical data transmission, at 1 Gbit/s (1.4 Gbit/s in selected production), made i n GaAs technology. The transceiver makes the parallel-to-serial and se rial-to-parallel conversion as well as the encoding and decoding of 32 bit data words. The circuit operates in a completely asynchronous mod e, allowing the possibility of switching on-off the transmission in fe w nsec and of using the transceiver not only in point-to-point topolog ies, but also in flooding topologies (i.e. star connections) [2], [9], 12]. The radiation hardness and the relatively low power consumption, respect to TTL, of the GaAs, extend the use of the chip to a large nu mber of applications in present and future high energy physics experim ental apparatus.