The Cathode Strip Chamber Data Acquisition System for CMS

The Cathode Strip Chamber (CSC) [1] Data Acquisition (DAQ) system for the CMS [2] experiment at the LHC [3] will be described. The CSC system is large, consisting of 218K cathode channels and 183K anode channels. This leads to a substantial data rate of ~1.5GByte/s at LHC design luminosity (1034cm-2s-1) and the CMS first level trigger (L1A) rate of 100KHz. The DAQ system consists of three parts. The first part is on-chamber Cathode Front End Boards (CFEB)[4], which amplify, shape, store, and digitise chamber cathode signals, and Anode Front End Boards (AFEB)[5], which amplify, shape and discriminate chamber anode signals. The second part is the Peripheral Crate Data Acquisition Motherboards (DAQMB), which control the onchamber electronics and the readout of the chamber. The third part is the off-detector DAQ interface boards, which perform real time error checking, electronics reset requests and data concentration. It passes the resulting data to a CSC local DAQ farm, as well as CMS main DAQ [6]. All electronics in the system employ FPGAs allowing programmability. In addition, several high-speed serial interface technologies are employed.