HILLSBORO, OR- TriQuint Semiconductor, Inc.'s technology was leveraged in the design of integrated circuits (ICs) that will be used in the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Billed by some as the "world's biggest, most highly anticipated physics experiment," the LHC is a 27-km (17-mile)-long particle accelerator. It was designed by the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) to help physicists recreate the conditions that occurred just after the Big Bang. The project has been in development for 20 years and includes input from 7000 scientists from 60 countries. Aside from pursuing basic physics goals, the LHC experiments may help scientists treat diseases, improve the Internet, and open the door to travel through extra dimensions.
TriQuint's GaAs foundry process was used by IPtronics ApS as it developed thousands of specialized gallium-arsenide (GaAs) ICs. The resulting PA8-E devices are used as front-end electronics for Resistive Plate Chambers (RPC), a gaseous detector capable of sub-nanosecond time resolution on large areas. These GaAs-based ICs were shipped to the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics. They are being used as muon trigger detectors in ATLASone of the four experiments being carried out at the LHC. Muons are subatomic particles that can be produced in high-energy (7+7 TeV) protonproton collisions occurring in the LHC.