Production and commissioning performance tests of the read-out driver boards for the hadronic tile calorimeter of the ATLAS detector at the LHC
The ATLAS hadronic tile calorimeter detector (TileCal) is an iron-scintillating tiles sampling calorimeter designed to operate at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerator at CERN. The central element of the back-end system of the TileCal detector is a 9U VME read-out driver (ROD) board. The operation of the TileCal calorimeter requires a total of 32 ROD boards. We report here on the overall electrical performance of the ROD boards during their production phase and during their first operation at the ATLAS commissioning setup at CERN. We report also on the real time operation and performance of the ROD digital signal processors (DSPs) on the first cosmic data runs taken at the commissioning setup. The DSP operation is based on the use of optimal filtering algorithms for the signal amplitude, pedestal and time online reconstruction and which, in addition, monitor the quality of the reconstructions
The Read-Out Driver for the RPC of the ATLAS Muon Spectrometer
The spectrometer of the ATLAS experiment has been designed to identify muon tracks with transverse momenta up to 1 TeV/c. Its barrel section is made of monitored drift tubes and resistive plate chambers (RPCs) arranged into 32 sectors, to form two wheels surrounding the interaction point. The RPC subsystem provides the level-1 trigger in the barrel and it is read out by a specific DAQ system. On-detector electronics pack the RPC data in frames with an event number assigned by the trigger logic and transmit them to the counting room optically. Data from each sector are then routed together to a read-out driver (ROD) board. This is a custom processor that parses the frames, checks their coherence and builds a data structure for all the RPCs of one of the 32 sectors of the spectrometer. Each ROD sends the event fragments to a read-out buffer for further event building and analysis. The ROD is a VME64x board, designed around two Xilinx Virtex-II FPGAs and an ARM7 microcontroller. In this paper we describe the system architecture, the event binding algorithms and the monitoring features embedded into the design. The board is in production and will be deployed in the first ATLAS runs.
ROD general requirements and present hardware solution for the ATLAS tile calorimeter
This work describes the general requirements and present hardware solution of the Read Out Driver for the ATLAS Tile Calorimeter. The developments currently under execution include the adaptation and test of the LiAr ROD to TileCal needs. In fact, our actual work is centred in the new ROD Motherboard design and to program the Staging FPGA for TileCal and LiAr. Nevertheless, there are more activities under development such as software studies of the algorithm for processing the detector data (Optimal Filtering), the implementation of it in Digital Signal Processors and the integration of the system in the DAQ chain using Online Software (DAQ-1 project).