Upgrade of the ALICE-TPC read-out electronics

The ALICE experiment at CERN LHC employs a large volume time projection chamber (TPC) as its main tracking device. Instigated by analyses indicating that the high level trigger is capable of sifting events with rare physics probes, it is endeavoured to read out the TPC an order of magnitude faster then was reckoned during the design of its read-out electronics. Based on an analysis of the read-out performance of the current system, an upgrade of the front-end read-out network is proposed. The performance of the foreseen architecture is simulated with raw data from real 7 TeV pp collisions. Events are superimposed in order to emulate the future ALICE running conditions: high multiplicity events generated either by PbPb collisions or by the superposition (pile-up) of a large number of pp collisions. The first prototype of the main building block has been produced and characterised, demonstrating the feasibility of the approach