Göttingen 2025 – scientific programme

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 34: Data, AI, Computing, Electronics IV (DAQ, Detector Electronics)

T 34.6: Talk

Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 17:30–17:45, VG 2.102

ATLAS ITk-Pixel read-out stress tests — •Matthias Drescher, Jörn Große-Knetter, Arnulf Quadt, and Ali Skaf — II. Physikalisches Institut, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

The current ATLAS Inner Detector will be upgraded to an all-silicon Inner Tracker (ITk) for the Phase 2 upgrade of the experiment. The ATLAS ITk readout system is based on the FELIX hardware/software used to interface the on-detector components from the higher-level DAQ infrastructure. One FELIX card has 24 optical fibre links, which are fanned out to multiple Pixel modules by the lpGBT aggregator chip. To ensure stable operation under full load before moving to the final large-scale readout system, a stress test is being prepared populating all 24 FELIX fibres.

The data generation for the stress test takes place on several AMD FPGA boards, each containing multiple instances of lpGBT and front-end chip emulators. For this project, multiple front-end emulator flavours are developed to generate data streams according to the ITkPix production chip or the RD53A prototype chip data format. The front-end emulators use a hybrid design, where the test data is partially encoded off-FPGA and then stored in the FPGA's memory, to be fully encoded by the FPGA logic. As such, the project consists of both the FPGA design and the external software written in Python, which prepares the test data and automates the tests. Tests have been performed with both types of emulator flavours.

Keywords: ITk Pixel; FELIX; FPGA; Hardware emulation; Stress test