Development of an FPGA Emulator for the RD53A Test Chip

In 2024 the LHC will be shut down for an extended period to perform upgrades to the instrument and the detectors located on it. One such upgrade is the Front End ITk upgrade in ATLAS Pixel. New hardware is being developed for this upgrade, and a test chip called the RD53A has been created as a prototype version of that future hardware. Primarily because of restrictions associated with the RD53A chip, including its limited availability to researchers, its inability to generate realistic data without radiation present, and the speed at which changes to the physical chip can be made when issues are found, The Adaptive Computing Machines and Emulators (ACME) lab at the University of Washington built and maintains code to emulate the RD53A. The Emulator solves the problems posed by the physical chip: The code is downloadable from an online repository and runs on a commercially available FPGA and thereby is easily accessible to researchers; It generates realistic hit data without need for irradiation; and, when the Emulator needs to be altered to fix issues or target certain research applications, turnaround can be completed in hours, not weeks. The motivation for the Emulator, its current state of development, and my personal work on the architecture and logic are explained in this thesis.