Speaker
Description
A dedicated electronic circuit breaker has been developed to provide autonomous thermal protection for the front-end electronics of the CMS Improved Resistive Plate Chamber (iRPC) system at the High-Luminosity LHC. The board continuously monitors the temperature near the front-end ASICs using a PT100 sensor and disconnects the 4 V power supply whenever a predefined safety threshold is exceeded. To ensure high reliability, the protection logic adopts a redundant, fail-safe architecture based on a simple analog circuit with MOSFET switches, without the use of digital processing logic. The board was validated through laboratory measurements and tested with fully instrumented iRPC chambers at CERN on cosmic stand and at the Gamma Irradiation Facility (GIF++). The results confirmed stable operation and no measurable impact on detector performance (noise, efficiency, working point). This poster presents the design, implementation and experimental validation of the circuit breaker, demonstrating its effectiveness as a reliable thermal protection system for the CMS RPC front-end electronics while remaining fully transparent to detector performance.