The Quality-Assurance Test of the ATLAS New Small Wheel Read-Out Controller ASIC

Abstract

The Read-Out Controller (ROC) ASIC will be used to store, de-randomize, aggregate, filter and form complex packets with the digitized data coming from the New Small Wheel (NSW) muon detectors of the ATLAS experiment. The ASIC test setup is based on a Xilinx Kintex Ultrascale FPGA evaluation board, implementing input data streams emulators and output data analyzers for functional verification which are controlled and monitored by a MicroBlaze microprocessor. The jitter and skew of the ASIC’s PLL outputs are measured using oscilloscopes and logic analyzers. The design validation, test procedure and quality-assurance mass-testing results are presented.