Design, production and first operation of the ALICE Silicon Pixel Detector system

The ALICE Silicon Pixel Detector (SPD) constitutes the two innermost barrel layers of the ALICE experiment. The SPD is the detector closest to the interaction point, mounted around the beam pipe with the two layers at r=3.9 cm and 7.6 cm distance from beam axis. In order to reduce multiple scattering the material budget per layer in the active region has been limited to ≈1% X0. The SPD consists of 120 hybrid silicon pixel detectors modules with a total of ~107 cells. The on-detector read-out is based on a multi-chip-module containing 4 ASICs and an optical transceiver module. The readout electronics, located in the control room, is housed in 20 VME boards; it is the interface to the ALICE trigger, data acquisition, control system and detector electronics. In this contribution the SPD detector components design and production are reviewed. First operation results are reported.