Production and Testing of the LHCb Outer Tracker Front End Readout Electronics

TL;DR

This paper details the design, production, and testing of the LHCb Outer Tracker's front-end readout electronics, highlighting the quality assurance process and performance validation using a specialized FE-Tester.

Contribution

It introduces the development and testing procedures for the Outer Tracker's front-end electronics, ensuring precise timing and reliable operation in a high-occupancy environment.

Findings

Successful production of FE-Boxes with quality assurance

FE-Tester effectively simulates detector signals

Electronics meet timing and occupancy requirements

Abstract

The LHCb Outer Tracker is a straw drift detector with a modular design and a total of 53760 readout channels distributed over a sensitive area of 12 double layers of 6x5 m2 each. The main electronics readout requirement is the precise (0.5 ns) drift time measurement at an occupancy of 4% and 1 MHz readout. A total of 128 channels are read out by one Front-End box. About half of the FE-Boxes have been built. Quality Assurance during the production has been performed on single FE-Box components. The assembled FE-Box is finally commissioned using a special FE-Tester. The FE-Tester is a programmable pulser with a time resolution of 150 ps capable to simulate all the functionality of the readout mimicking the real detector. Consequently, problems have been found and solved resulting in good overall performance.