Abstract
The portable test-bench for the certification of the ATLAS tile hadronic calorimeter front-end electronics has been redesigned for the present Long Shutdown (LS1) of LHC, improving its portability and expanding its functionalities. This paper presents a new test-bench based on a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA that implements an embedded system using a PowerPC 440 microprocessor hard core and custom IP cores. A light Linux version runs on the PowerPC microprocessor and handles the IP cores which implement the different functionalities needed to perform the desired tests such as TTCvi emulation, G-Link decoding, ADC control and data reception.
Highlights
The redesign of the MobiDICK system has been motivated by the difficulty finding replacements for some parts of the previous system and the possibility of improving the mobility of the portable test-bench
The new MobiDICK comprises a Xilinx ML507 evaluation board and a set of custom and commercial boards which replace the old system based on a VME system
The hard core PowerPC is used as processor in a custom embedded system which runs a lightweight Linux version as operating system
Summary
The previous version of the MobiDICK system (Mobile Drawer Integrity Checking system) [5] was designed to check the integrity of the TileCal super-drawers in situ during the installation and maintenance periods This test-bench is capable of testing the functionality, configuring and emulating the back-end electronics. This card receives the digital data coming from the interface board via an SFP optical connector. This slow path communication is used to configure some parts of the front-end electronics and read back data from the ADC-I card. The client is a C++ program, so-called Willy, which runs on a laptop under Linux This Graphical User Interface (GUI) allows the operator to initiate the tests, visualize and analyze the results through a friendly graphical interface.
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