Design of a Portable Test Facility for the ATLAS Tile Calorimeter Front-End Electronics Verification

An FPGA-based motherboard with an embedded hardware processor is used to implement a portable test- bench for the full certification of Tile Calorimeter front-end electronics in the ATLAS experiment at CERN. This upgrade will also allow testing future versions of the TileCal read-out electronics as well. Because of its lightness the new facility is highly portable, allowing on-detector validation using sophisticated algorithms. The new system comprises a front-end GUI running on an external portable computer which controls the motherboard. It also includes several dedicated daughter-boards that exercise the different specialized functionalities of the system. Apart from being used to evaluate different technologies for the future upgrades, it will be used to certify the consolidation of the electronics by identifying low frequency failures. The results of the tests presented here show that new system is well suited for the 2013 ATLAS Long Shutdown. We discuss all requirements necessary to give full confidence in the operation of the on-detector electronics.