Calibrating the ATLAS Semiconductor Tracker Front End Electronics

The semiconductor tracker (SCT) will form a vital part of the ATLAS experiment, one of two general-purpose experiments for the forthcoming Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory. The active elements of the SCT are 4088 radiation-hard silicon detector modules, tiled on four barrel cylinders and eighteen end-cap disks. It will have in total more than 6 million channels each providing 1-bit binary signal discrimination every 25 nanoseconds. The SCT is currently in full production with macro-assembly taking place at several sites. During assembly, frequent quality assurance and characterization measurements are performed using the high-performance opto-electronic data acquisition system designed for the final experiment. This talk offers an overview of the data acquisition hardware, and the calibration and control systems for the electronics front-end, as well as early results from the macro-construction.