Visiting South African plant for production of electronics for the European Laboratory CERN

Today a Wits team from the High-throughput electronics laboratory within the Institute for Collider Particle Physics visited Jemstech. This electronics  plant has populated the electronics boards for the first prototype made in South Africa of the Low Voltage Power Supplies (LVPS) for the upgraded Tile Calorimeter of the ATLAS Detector at CERN. The LVPS will power the future on-detector electronics of the Tile Calorimeter that is being designed for the Phase-II upgrade of this detector. South Africa is responsible for the production of over 1000 of these boards, where the PCBs are manufactured in Trax, Cape Town and passed to Jemstech for population.

The Wits team in charge of the South African production is composed of Edward Nkadimeng, Nkhosiphendule Njara, Thabo Lepota, Ryan McKenzie, Charles Sandrock, Roger van Rensburg and Bruce Mellado.

The purpose of the visit is to discuss the production of the second and close-to-final prototype of the LVPS. We discussed quality control issues, details of the bill of materials and other components. Discussed the implementation of Artificial Intelligence in the process of quality control assessment.

Chatted with the Managing Director of Jemstech who was upbeat about his plant. Jemstech delivers commissions for Airbus and will enhance its production capabilities by 600% in July.

Population of the Low Voltage Power Supply boards for the upgrade of the Tile Calorimeter of the ATLAS detector

Below are some pictures of the population of the Low Voltage Power Supply boards for the upgrade of the Tile Calorimeter of the ATLAS detector. These boards will be sitting on the detector and will provide power to critical components of the on-detector electronics. The population is taking place at Jemstech

http://www.jemstech.co.za

The PCBs were manufactured in Trax

http://www.trax.co.za

Below is the final installation of the thermal posts on a slab of 8 boards

The Fourth High Energy Particle Physics in South Africa is taking place at the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies.

The Fourth High Energy Particle Physics in South Africa is taking place at the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies.

The HEPP workshop is now taking place at STIAS, at Stellenbosch University in the Western Cape. This is the fourth edict in of the HEPP workshop. We have seen a steady increase in the participation of students and senior researchers. Compared to the first edition in 2015 the attendance has increased by about a factor of two. The format of the workshop is such that mornings have lecture style presentations. The afternoons display selected presentations from students or groups of students.

http://hep.wits.ac.za/HEPPW2018.php

Representing iThemba LABS, the host of the SA-CERN consortium, Dr. Mathis Wiedeking, addressed the audience. Dr. Wiedeking touched upon the history of the program and commended the large student participation.

Prof. Jean Cleymans, the Chairman of the SA-CERN consortium was invited to give an introductory lecture on the physics of the Heavy Ion collisions, including an overview highlights of results from the ALICE experiment at CERN.

Below is a group picture taken this morning during the first coffee break:

Below is Dr. Daniel Dercks, from the University of Hamburg, has invited to visit SA to give lectures on the state of the art books in High Energy Physics in the area of phenomenology.

Opening session of the ATLAS Tile Calorimeter Upgrade week at iThemba LABS, Cape Town, March 15th 2017

Today we had the opening session of the ATLAS Tile Calorimeter Upgrade week at iThemba LABS, Cape Town. The workshop focuses on questions of instrumentation related to the upgrade of the Tile Calorimeter of the ATLAS detector  at the Large Hadron Collider. Below are photos from the morning session:

The Director of iThemba LABS addresses the audience

Daniel, Dock, the Managing Director of Trax Interconnect (Pty) Ltd gives a presentation with the title  "Capabilities of the South African Electronics Industry"

Dr. Oleg Solovyanov, Project Leader of the Tile Calorimeter gives a colloquium with the title "The Upgrade of the Tile Calorimeter of the ATLAS Detector at the Large Hadron Collider"

The group photo after the open session

After several  intense weeks of preparation, the demonstrator inside  the Module JINR65 finally makes it to the TB site.  We had   certainly few glitches  but you can see from the picture attached that  we were ready for everything and neither  a  flat tire    could have stopped us today. Moreover, it seems to works pretty well.  A couple of pictures depicting some of the action from today...

Standing next to the truck with the extended barrel module is Dingane Hlaluku in Building 175 where the module was assembled and tested and it is now being taken to the test beam site at Prevessin.

Dingane Hlaluku  (Wits) and Andrew Milton (University of Chicago) closing up the module after inserting the super drawers in Building 175.

Dingane Hlaluku connecting the Single Board Computer (SBC) and the Trigger and Timing Control unit (TTC) for the module's back end electronics. The SBC is responsible for communication between the back end electronics devices which are the TTC, Central Trigger Processing etc. The SBC is also responsible for reading out information.  

Dingane, Irakli and Jallal in building 175 inserting the Super Drawers into the Extended barrel module.

Wits participation in the ATLAS Tile Calorimeter demonstrator expert week: 7 – 11 September 2015

Last week Dr Oscar Kureba (Postdoc) and Charles Sandrock (Chief Technical Manager) of the Wits school of Physics took part in the expert week organized by the Tile Calorimeter group of ATLAS at CERN. The main goals of the expert week were: 

Electronics:

• Debugging the problems and instabilities observed in the single clock domain firmware,
• Measurements  and characterisation of the clock at the CDCE output on the DBs. Jitter, etc,
• Integrate the Demonstrator/TPP into a  TTC/DAQ partition,
• Insert the demonstrator into the module and  perform the inter calibration  with the Cs source.

Mechanics:

• Follow up the construction of the lifting tools and the test qualification by CERN safety experts.

Oscar worked on the electronics while Charles was involved in the mechanics side. In a nutshell, it was a fairly successful expert week as nearly all the goals were met. The demonstrator tests gave the most impressive results to date. However, more still needs to be done in fine tuning of the firmware before the upcoming test beam period (7 – 21 October). Below are some pictures, just to give a feel of the proceedings throughout the said week.

Programme of the week

Men at work: Testing hardware and firmware of the super ReadOut Driver (sROD). 

TileCal front-end electronics demonstrator, before insertion into the Hadronic module for the performance of a Cs calibration

Some of the experts during one of the morning meetings to strategise for the day ahead. 

New ADC FMC board for PROMETEO manufactured in South Africa

Figure 1: Two fully assembled ADC FMC trigger boards for PROMETEO test-bench: Made in South Africa..

An improved version of the ADC FMC trigger board to be used in the PROMETEO test-bench has been in development at Wits University. PROMETEO is the next generation test-bench system that will be used for the full certification of the upgraded front-end electronics of the ATLAS's Tile Calorimeter at CERN.

The board was developed to filter and digitise analog trigger signals coming from the front-end electronics of the TileCal. It makes use of two ADC571 chips to sample 16 differential analog signals at 40 MHz using a 12-bit resolution.  A Xilinx VC707 dev-board with a Virtex-7 FPGA is used for the control and data read-out of the ADC board. The 16 data channels to the FPGA have a combined data rate of 7680 Mbps.

Two fully assembled ADC FMC trigger boards were delivered to Wits yesterday. Oscar Kureba and Matthew Spoor are currently in the process of testing the functionality of the boards. Matthew will be off to CERN next week, where integration of the board with the rest of the PROMETEO components will take place.

Visiting Parsec, a company considered for the production of the ATLAS TileCal's sROD module

Few of us from Wits, Bheku Zulu, Ela Romanonowska, from the Wits Enterprise, Thomas Wrigley and myself visited Parsec

http://www.parsec.co.za

Parsec is a high-tech company that produces advanced electronics for the domestic and foreign markets. We are considering using Parsec for the population of the boards of the sROD (super Read Out Driver) for the upgrade of the off-detector electronics of the Tile Calorimeter. Parsec just moved to a new building about 15k from Pretoria.

Below few pictures of the visit

New ADC daughter board for the ATLAS TileCal PROMETEO test-bench

An improved version of the ADC daughter board used in the PROMETEO test-bench has been in development at WITS. PROMETEO is the new test-bench system that will be used for the full certification of the upgraded front-end electronics of the ATLAS TileCal.

The board was developed to filter and digitise analog trigger signals coming from the front-end electronics of the TileCal. It makes use of two ADC571 chips to sample 16 differential analog signals at 40 MHz using a 12-bit resolution.  A Xilinx VC707 dev-board with a Virtex-7 FPGA is used for the control and data read-out of the ADC board. The 16 data channels to the FPGA have a combined data rate of 7680 Mbps.

This week we received the newly manufactured PCBs which have since been sent off for assembly. Once final testing is completed the new board will be fully integrated into the ATLAS system.

Helping out with ATLAS Tile Calorimeter Demonstrator

In May this year I moved to CERN in Switzerland for 3 months as part of my studies at University of the Witwatersrand. I have since joined the ATLAS Tile Calorimeter Demonstrator project Group and been helping out where I can. Their aim has been to design, build and install a Hybrid Demonstrator prototype that will replace the aging front-end electronics from 1 to 3 slices of the ATLAS TileCal before RUN 2 begins in 2015. 

The entire LHC is in the process of being upgraded, by 2024 Phase II will begin where the beam energy will be increased to √s = 14 TeV and particle luminosity by a factor of 5. This will potentially address the unsolved mysteries such as dark matter. The demonstrator system needs to be fully compatible with current detector electronics as well as act as a validation for the new read-out architecture (Hybrid Design). Once fully upgraded the data output from the ATLAS TileCal will increase by 200 times to estimated 40 Tb/s!!

Earlier this month CERN had its second TileCal expert week of the year. Experts from around the world came together to help with the build of the first fully assembled Hybrid Demonstrator “Superdraw” prototype. A superdraw is composed 4 separate “minidraws” each that are independent in terms of power, readout and configuration. A total of 45 PMTs, 4 Motherboards, 4 High voltage Cards and 4 Daughter boards were needed to be assembled and connected together. The week was very successful with many new problems being identified as well as confirmation that all the components fitted together correctly and that the entire draw was able to fit in a slice of TileCal. Below are a few photos from that weeks assembly.

Newly built PMTs ready for use.
 

 Fully Assembled Minidraw.

Demonstrator Superdraw ready for testing.

 Insertion of the Draw into a Test Slice of the TileCal.