  The apparatus of the ALICE experiment at CERN will be upgraded in 2017/18
during the second long shutdown of the LHC (LS2). A major motivation for this
upgrade is to extend the physics reach for charmed and beauty particles down to
low transverse momenta. This requires a substantial improvement of the spatial
resolution and the data rate capability of the ALICE Inner Tracking System
(ITS). To achieve this goal, the new ITS will be equipped with 50 um thin CMOS
Pixel Sensors (CPS) covering either the 3 innermost layers or all the 7 layers
of the detector. The CPS being developed for the ITS upgrade at IPHC
(Strasbourg) is derived from the MIMOSA 28 sensor realised for the STAR-PXL at
RHIC in a 0.35 um CMOS process. In order to satisfy the ITS upgrade
requirements in terms of readout speed and radiation tolerance, a CMOS process
with a reduced feature size and a high resistivity epitaxial layer should be
exploited. In this respect, the charged particle detection performance and
radiation hardness of the TowerJazz 0.18 um CMOS process were studied with the
help of the first prototype chip MIMOSA 32. The beam tests performed with
negative pions of 120 GeV/c at the CERN-SPS allowed to measure a
signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for the non-irradiated chip in the range between 22
and 32 depending on the pixel design. The chip irradiated with the combined
dose of 1 MRad and 10^13 n_eq/cm^2 was observed to yield a SNR ranging between
11 and 23 for coolant temperatures varying from 15 C to 30 C. These SNR values
were measured to result in particle detection efficiencies above 99.5% and 98%
before and after irradiation respectively. These satisfactory results allow to
validate the TowerJazz 0.18 um CMOS process for the ALICE ITS upgrade.
