Design, Construction, and Testing of the APOLLO ATCA Blades for Use at the HL-LHC

TL;DR

This paper details the design, construction, and testing of Apollo ATCA blades, a modular platform for high-speed data acquisition and processing in HL-LHC experiments, emphasizing cost-effectiveness and flexibility.

Contribution

It introduces a novel ATCA platform with customizable modules and high-speed optical transceivers for HL-LHC applications, including detailed design and testing results.

Findings

Successful testing of Apollo blades at multiple institutions

High-speed optical transceivers capable of 25 Gb/s demonstrated

Platform supports cost-effective, flexible data acquisition for HL-LHC

Abstract

The Apollo Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA) platform is an open-source design consisting of a generic "Service Module" (SM) and a customizable "Command Module" (CM), allowing for cost-effective use in applications such as the readout of the inner tracker and the Level-1 track trigger for the CMS Phase-II upgrade at the HL-LHC. The SM integrates an intelligent IPMC, robust power entry and conditioning systems, a powerful system-on-module computer, and flexible clock and communication infrastructure. The CM is designed around two Xilinx Ultrascale+ FPGAs and high-density, high-bandwidth optical transceivers capable of 25 Gb/s. Crates of Apollo blades are currently being tested at Boston University, Cornell University, and CERN.