Automatic test system for pFEB and sFEB mass production

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents an automatic test system(ATS) for the pad front-end board(pFEB) and strip front-end board(sFEB) of ATLAS small-strip Thin Gap Chamber(sTGC) detector. The pFEB is designed to readout signals of pads and wires of sTGC detector, and the sFEB is designed to readout signals of strips of sTGC detector. There will be thousands of pFEBs and sFEBs produced in mass production (including spare p/sFEBs), and all of them must pass the quality tests before delivery. To reduce the time and man power cost of the quality tests, we developed this automatic test system for mass production tests of p/sFEBs. The test system consists of a FEB Test Board(FTB), a Test Pulse Board(TPB) and a control software. The FTB connects with p/sFEB through mini-SAS cables and communicates with the control software through Gigabit Ethernet. The TPB injects external test signals to p/sFEB through GFZ. The control software provides several interfaces to set configuration parameters for p/sFEB and controls the test processes. The FTB sends configuration data to p/sFEB, and then readouts data from the them. The output data includes 4.8Gbps trigger data, 640Mbps level-1 event data, and so on. They are analyzed in FTB and then sent to the control software. The test system can automatically scan main functions and performances of p/sFEB, including channels performances, the configuration chain, the data chain, the trigger chain, etc. The specific characteristics and implementations are described in detail.