High speed ethernet application for the trigger electronics of the new small wheel

Abstract

The ATLAS detector will be upgraded in 2018. The main focus of the Phase-I ATLAS upgrade is on the Level-1 trigger, replacing the present muon small wheels (SW) with the “new small wheel(NSW)”, which consists of small thin gap chamber(sTGC) and micromegas (MM). A versatile application-specific integrated circuit(ASIC), the VMM chip, have been developed to read out the signals of the sTGC and MM. The VMM have 64 channels. In order to test the performance of the VMM, a large data transfer rate is needed. Meanwhile, it is required to implement the multi-board interconnection. It is proposed to apply the high-speed Ethernet-based network. We designed and implemented a test platform, the Gigabit Ethernet Module(GEM). The test result shows that the transfer rate can reach up to 926Mbps. Subsequently, the Ethernet is applied in the pad front end board (pFEB) and the thin gap chamber simulation signal generator (SG). This paper introduces the implementation of the GEM platform, as well as its applications. The features of the systems are described in detail.