ALICE TPC control and read-out system

ALICE is a dedicated heavy-ion experiment at CERN LHC aiming to study the properties of the quark–gluon plasma. A lead– lead collision might produce several ten thousand new particles. Detailed study of the event requires precise measurements of the particle tracks. A 90 m3 Time Projection Chamber (TPC) with more than 500 000 read-out pads was built as the main central barrel tracker. Collisions can be recorded at a rate of up to about 1 kHz. The front-end electronics, designed from FPGAs and custom ASICs, performs shaping, amplification, digitisation and digital filtering of the signals. The data is forwarded to DAQ via 216 1.25 Gb/s fibre-optical links. Configuration, control and monitoring is done by an embedded Linux system on the front-end electronics. First results on the performance of the front-end electronics and the distributed detector control system are presented.