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.

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.

Prometeo, the next generation test bench for the tile calorimeter upgrade in ATLAS.

During Sep 9.-Sep12, the expert week of the tile calorimeter upgrade, the latest version of Prometeo GUI was published.  After several months designing and consulting from tile calorimeter users, the design has been fixed and working well.

Prometeo is the test bench for the tile calorimeter upgrade in 2022. It is a portable enclosure which is able to certify the tile calorimeter front-end electronics in the maintenance. Prometeo shares the same design of super read-out driver(sROD) and working at the LHC bunch crossing frequency.

The Prometeo GUI is an interface for experts and users to diagnose the front-end electronics. The interface is web and it calls python scripts in the back-end to control the main board in Prometeo. The whole program is running on CERN web service or a mini linux machine inside Prometeo.

The motivation of using the web interface is:
1) Compilation free
2) Compatible of different platforms, PAD, smartphone, or regular PC
3) Robustness in more than 10 years.
4) Compatible to CERN-ROOT software and easy for interface design.

The web interface is much easier than a regular GUI, like Qt/JavaSwing. It is often seen in some router software and it is used well in some HEP tools like MadGraph. The Prometeo GUI combines the web, python, IPbus hardware control together. It is a good mode for a light weight hardware control software.