20The Timepix particle tracking telescope has been developed as part of the LHCb VELO Upgrade project, supported by the Medipix Collaboration and the AIDA framework. It is a primary piece of infrastructure for the VELO Upgrade project and is being used for the development of new sensors and front end technologies for several upcoming LHC trackers and vertexing systems. The telescope is designed around the dual capability of the Timepix ASICs to provide information 25 about either the deposited charge or the timing information from tracks traversing the 14×14 mm matrix of 55 × 55 µm pixels. The rate of reconstructed tracks available is optimised by taking advantage of the shutter driver readout architecture of the Timepix chip, operated with existing readout systems. Results of tests conducted in the SPS North Area beam facility at CERN show that the telescope typically provides reconstructed track rates during the beam spills of 30 between 3.5 and 7.5 kHz, depending on beam conditions. The tracks are time stamped with 1 ns resolution with an efficiency of above 98% and provide a pointing resolution at the centre of the telescope of ∼1.6 µm . By dropping the time stamping requirement the rate can be increased to ∼15 kHz, at the expense of a small increase in background. The telescope infrastructure provides CO 2 cooling and a flexible mechanical interface to the device under test, and has been used for 35 a wide range of measurements during the 2011-2012 data taking campaigns.

The goal of this project is to examine the feasibility of data transmission up to ∼5 Gbit/s on a short (∼60 cm) low mass flex cable, for the readout of the upgraded vertex detector (VELO) of the LHCb experiment. They will be in a vacuum and very high radiation environment and also partly in the particle acceptance. For the full system 1600 readout links will be required. A set of single-ended and differential (edge-coupled) striplines, with a variety of line parameters have been prototyped using a material specifically tailored for this type of application (Dupont Pyralux AP-plus polyimide). To reduce mass, the total thickness of the cable is kept to 0.7 mm. We will present measurements of the characteristic impedance, insertion and return loss, obtained both from time and frequency domain, as well as a comparison with simulations and expectations. Also the effectiveness of grounded guard traces and the use of ground via holes to reduce crosstalk will be reported. From the measurements we were also able to extract the material properties such as the dielectric constant and loss factor up to several GHz. The measurements were done with a Vector Network Analyzer (VNA), TDR/TDT Digital Sampling Oscilloscope, serial PRBS generator and analyzer for eye diagram and CAD tools such as Agilent ADS and ANSYS HFSS simulators.