Integration and design for the ALICE ITS readout chain

Abstract

ALICE and its Inner Tracking System detector in the LHC at CERN will undergo a major upgrade during its second long shutdown taking place in 2019 and 2020. New silicon sensors called ALPIDE will be utilized, which requires a new readout electronics system due to different interfaces and higher demands regarding band- width and latency. The readout chain consists of staves containing the sensors, a layer of readout unit boards gathering data from and controlling the sensor staves, and a layer of common readout units multiplexing and compressing data from the readout units before forwarding it to the O² data center system. As part of the ALICE collaboration, The University of Bergen is in charge of the development of several components in this readout chain. All development sites for the readout electronics should have the readout chain in place so that design and integration tasks can be done locally. As part of the work in this thesis, the ITS readout chain is integrated and tested. The working readout chain is then used to develop various control communication interfaces along the chain, such as an I²C interface for an auxiliary FPGA on the readout unit, and a high-speed interface for uploading data to the flash memory on the readout unit.