Design and Development of Electronics and the Control Software for the Silicon Tracker of LHCb

LHCb is one of the four main experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The Silicon Tracker of LHCb is a silicon micro-strip detector designed to perform a precise measurement of the particle trajectories produced by the proton-proton interactions. It consists of two sub-detectors, the Tracker Turicensis (TT) and the Inner Tracker (IT) and covers an area of about 12 m2 in the highest occupancy region around the beam axis. The work described in this thesis covers many aspects of the development and construction of the Silicon Tracker detector. The development of a closely similar control and monitoring system for the IT and TT sub-detectors was the main task. The design and development of a common Control Board for IT and TT is one of the corner-stones of this thesis, and a detailed description of it is given. The design and development of the LV and HV systems is also reported as part of the work of this thesis. The design and implementation of the final control software based of the PVSS SCADA and the concept of Finite State Machines is detailed as well. A full system was implemented: from the basic hardware components to the high-level software. The low voltage and high voltage systems, the Control Board, the Digitizer Boards, the readout hybrids, TELL1s... were developed, assembled all together and linked to the Experiment Control System to build the ST detector of LHCb. The work of this thesis has been mainly focused in the construction of the three first items in the list and the Experiment Control System, but an important role has also been taken in the testing and development of other parts of the system and their overall integration giving as a final result the construction of a fully functional Silicon Tracker detector.