STMicroelectronics praises CERN's Higgs Boson Success

“This has been a multinational effort, involving many thousands of people, to build the equipment, collect and process data, and validate the results,” said Carmelo Papa, Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Industrial and Multisegment Sector at STMicroelectronics. “It has been rewarding for ST to have played a part, however small, in this important project revealing crucial truths about the nature of the universe and ourselves.”

For the CMS, a particle detector observing how collisions between protons convert energy into particles of finite mass and hence providing a glimpse of how matter came into existence after the Big Bang, ST has supplied many thousands of silicon sensors since 2002. Special requirements of these sensors included extremely high accuracy at die sizes around 100 times larger than a conventional semiconductor die. ST was able to produce sensors of the required purity, leveraging its high-quality in-house fabrication processes.

For the ATLAS detector, ST developed unique radiation-hardened positive and negative voltage regulators to be used in the liquid argon calorimeter electronics, the pixel detector, transition-radiation tracking detector, and other sub-systems. ST received a 2006 ATLAS Supplier Award for producing the regulators after ATLAS scientists found no existing devices capable of delivering sufficient current reliably when exposed to very high levels of radiation. The same technology has been used by ST to support the satellite and aerospace segments for several years. In addition to the voltage regulators, ST has supplied over 40,000 rad-hard diodes to ATLAS.