Citation
(2007), "UK Laboratory delivers major electronics system to unravel the mysteries of the Universe", Circuit World, Vol. 33 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/cw.2007.21733aab.010
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2007, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
UK Laboratory delivers major electronics system to unravel the mysteries of the Universe
UK Laboratory delivers major electronics system to unravel the mysteries of the Universe
The CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in Oxfordshire has successfully delivered a major electronics system, called the Tracker FED Readout, for the latest project at the European Centre for Particle Physics, CERN, in Geneva. The system will process the vast quantities of data to be generated by the world's largest silicon tracking detector – part of the international Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider facility at CERN. The CMS experiment will be used to study the conditions in the Universe just after the Big Bang.
The new electronics system, designed and developed by the CCLRC in collaboration with UK universities and manufactured in partnership with UK industry, comprises hundreds of complex electronics boards called Front End Driver (FED) boards.
Dr John Coughlan, FED Project Manager at RAL, said, “The collaboration with the manufacturing company, Exception EMS Ltd, has been excellent. The company has responded tremendously well to the challenge of the complexity of the board design and has maintained the required high quality of manufacture over several months of production. This has been a fine example of knowledge transfer with UK industry.”
The electronics boards fill a large room, and will be installed next to the giant CMS experiment in a cavern 100m underground. The system exploits the latest electronics techniques in massively parallel digital processing whereby many millions of channels are processed simultaneously using specially programmed chips.
The main job of the new boards is to receive data from the silicon detectors inside the CMS main detector. Each particle collision, or event, produces about 10,000,000b of silicon detector data and an individual board will handle 3,000,000,000b of data each second. The whole system processes the equivalent of the contents of 2,000 CDs every second and must operate around the clock for several months at a time each year!
Phillip Jackson, Managing Director, Exception EMS Ltd, said, “It is a joy to work closely with all our customers and certainly that is our experience with the CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory on the CMS FED project. The spirit of co-operation and teamwork has been as good as I can recall.”