Electronics packaging issues for future accelerators and experiments

Standard instrument modules for physics reached their zenith of industrial development from the early 1960s through late 1980s. Started by laboratory engineering groups in Europe and North America, modular electronic standards were successfully developed and commercialized. In the late 1980's a major shift in large detector design toward custom chips mounted directly on detectors started a decline in the use of standard modules for data acquisition. With the loss of the detector module business, commercial support declined. Today the engineering communities supporting future accelerators and experiments face a new set of challenges that demand much more reliable system design. The dominant system metric is availability. We propose (1) that future accelerator and detector systems be evaluated against a design for availability (DFA) metric; (2) that modular design and standardization applied to all electronic and controls subsystems are key to high availability; and (3) that renewed laboratory-industry collaboration(s) could make an invaluable contribution to design and implementation.