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. 

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

First attempt to integrate Back-end and Front-end for the TileCal upgrade

Today we attempted for the first time to integrate the Back-end and Front-end of the new upgraded TileCal electronics. Work performed in collaboration with IFIC, Stockholm University, University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory and CERN. In the picture one can see the daughter board that will sit on the detector, connected with FPGA evaluation boards that serve as simulators of the future sROD.