Qualification of the ALICE SAMPA ASIC With a High-Speed Continuous DAQ System

During the Long Shutdown 2 of CERN's Large Hadron Collider, foreseen to start in 2019, the ALICE experiment will upgrade its time projection chamber (TPC) detector to cope with a Pb-Pb collision rate of 50 kHz in the next running phase. In the upgraded TPC, the gas electron multiplier (GEM) technology and continuous readout will replace the existing multiwire proportional chambers and triggered readout system. The GEM signals will be processed using a new custom designed mixed-signal front-end chip named SAMPA. The first version of SAMPA was delivered in 2014, and the production of the final version is in progress. This paper gives an overview of the design of the data acquisition system used in testing of the analog behavior of the first SAMPA version and the performance results of a SAMPA coupled to a pulse generator and a GEM detector prototype.