Image:Tracker FED Testing.jpg

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.

http://cmsinfo.cern.ch/outreach/Timeline/Archive/Archive2006/PicturesOfTheWeek/September/09_11.html

September 2006

S. Boreham

This file is in the public domain because it is from the homepage of CMS detector of CERN. All photos and movies are completely free to use, but they do request that if you find something useful (or if you have any suggestions as to how something could be improved), please send an email to cms.outreach@cern.ch