Elettrolinux

A readout system for microstrip silicon sensors has been developed as a result of a collaboration among the University of Liverpool, the CNM (Centro Nacional de Microelectrónica) of Barcelona and the IFIC (Instituto de Física Corpuscular) of Valencia. The name of this collaboration is ALIBAVA and it is integrated in the RD50 Collaboration. This system is able to measure the collected charge in one or two microstrip silicon sensors by reading out all the channels of the sensor(s), up to 256, as an analogue measurement. The system uses two Beetle chips to read out the detector(s). The Beetle chip is an analogue pipelined readout chip used in the LHCb experiment. The system can operate either with non-irradiated and irradiated sensors as well as with n-type and p-type microstrip silicon sensors. Heavily irradiated sensors will be used at the SLHC, so this system can be used to research the performance of microstrip silicon sensors in conditions as similar as possible to the SLHC operating conditions. The system has two main parts: a hardware part and a software part. Hardware part has a dual board based system part connected by flat cable. Mother board intended:

...and the daughter board:

This acquired data is sent by USB to be stored in a PC for a further processing. The software controls the system and processes the data acquired from the sensors in order to store it in an adequate format file. Alibava has two software levels, low level:

...and high level: