Picture of the Month

CMS Tracker Board testing

14 April 2006

 

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at CERN will be one of the world’s biggest particle detectors. CMS is one of the major experiments at the new CERN facility the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which is located in a 27km circumference circular tunnel 100m beneath the Swiss-French border near Geneva. Teams of particle physicists, electronics engineers and construction experts are building CMS piece by piece, in locations all around the world.

In the UK, one of the collaborating institutes is the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL). Here, around 500 large and complex electronics boards for the readout of the CMS silicon tracking detector are being produced, tested and shipped out to CERN.

This image shows Test Engineer Craig MacWaters looking underneath the chips on a FED board using the Ersascope™ optical inspection system at RAL.

The main job of the Tracker Front End Driver (FED) board is to receive data from the silicon detectors inside the CMS main detector at CERN.  40 million particle collisions will occur every second inside CMS. A trigger system selects 100,000 of those collisions each second as interesting events and these are fed through to the FEDs as laser light pulses along huge bundles of optical fibres. 

When the detector is running, an individual FED board will handle 3,000,000,000 Bytes of data each second. The whole FED system processes the equivalent of the contents of 2,000 CDs every second and must operate for several months each year.

Image Credit: Stuart Boreham

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