Design and Performance of an Automated Production Test System for a 20,000 Channel Single-Photon, Sub-Nanosecond Electronic Readout for a Large Area Muon Detector

Abstract

The successful physics program of the Belle experiment at KEK, Tsukuba, Japan, resulted in an upgrade of the KEKB collider and of the Belle detector. The expanded Belle II international collaboration, consisting of over 500 physicists and engineers from 97 institutions spread worldwide, aims to precisely test the Standard Model of particle physics, more specifically in a search for rare B and D meson decays, and charge parity (CP) violation, by performing unprecedented precision measurements. University of Hawaii at Manoa (UH Manoa) played a lead role in the design and construction of the iTOP and KLM detectors, in particular their electronic readout. For this purpose, a pair of state-of-the-art Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC) were developed in support for this world class experiment. Details of the TARGETX ASIC, a 16-channel Giga- Samples Per Second (GSPS) digitizer, developed by the Instrumentation Development Laboratory (IDLab), will be presented. Automated calibration routines were developed. Then, the performance of the ASIC was evaluated. In addition, the KLM detector readout electronics system was mass produced. Fully automated production test software was developed to systematically verify its correct operation. A serial numbering system with barcodes was set in place to properly monitor each sub-readout module and store results in a PostgreSQL database. The complete readout system will be presented, which is consisting of more than 20,000 measurement channels, and its associated electronic system.