Development of flexible, scalable, low cost readout for beam tests of the high granularity calorimeter for the CMS endcap

As part of the development of the High Granularity Calorimeter for the CMS Endcap at HL-LHC, The CMS collaboration is conducting a comprehensive series of beam tests. The first beam test, with a single HGC module was carried out in March of 2016 at the Fermilab Test Beam Facility, continuing to a 16 module test in July of 2016. We describe here the development of a low cost readout system that is simple to implement and is able to grow with the system under test. The system is based on the low cost Zynq SoC that allows simple DAQ development in a Linux environment. For this application we used the Digilent ZedBoard, which allows high speed LVDS links and Linux software development on a single commercial board. A small custom FPGA board designed to comply with the VITA 57 Field Programmable Mezzanine Card standard implements the interface to the readout ASIC mounted on the HGC sensor modules and provides the LVDS links to the ZedBoard, either directly over the FMC connector or via a custom carrier card. This architecture provides scalability, ease of development and low cost.