Radiation-Tolerant Universal Control Electronics for Energy Extraction Systems at CERN

This paper presents a novel radiation-tolerant Universal Control Electronics (UCE) platform for CERN's Energy Extraction Systems (EESs). Addressing the critical needs of safety, redundancy, and long-term reliability in high-radiation environments, the UCE replaces unique legacy systems with a modular, radiation-tolerant architecture that unifies control across all EES topologies. The system ensures robust operation through extensive redundancy at the component and functional levels, supporting complete fail-safe behaviour that is robust to power loss or faults. Universality is achieved via interchangeable hardware modules, simplifying maintenance and future expansion. With confirmed operational integrity until 512 Gy through CHARM irradiation campaigns, the UCE exceeds the stringent radiation tolerance and performance requirements, which improve with an increase in Total Ionising Dose (TID). A semi-empirically derived radiation effects simulation model was used to estimate the behaviour of a circuit under varying TID accurately and aid in tuning circuit parameters to achieve a sub-5 <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mu$</tex>s baseline system triggering response at <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathbf{5 1 2} \mathbf{G y}$</tex>. This universal, high-reliability solution is a significant advancement toward a scalable and maintainable EES control infrastructure for the High Luminosity-Large Hadron Collider upgrade.