Design of the front-end detector control system of the ATLAS New Small Wheels

The ATLAS experiment will be upgraded during the next LHC Long Shutdown (LS2). The flagship upgrade is the New Small Wheel (NSW) [1], which consists of 2 disks of Muon Gas detectors. The detector technologies used are Micromegas (MM) and sTGC, providing a total of 16 layers of tracking and trigger. The Slow Control Adapter (SCA) is part of the Gigabit Transceiver (GBT) - “Radiation Hard Optical Link Project” family of chips designed at CERN, EP-ESE department [2,3], which will be used at the NSW upgrade. The SCA offers several interfaces to read analogue and digital inputs, and configure front-end Readout ASICs, FPGAs, or other chips. The design of the NSW Detector Control System (DCS) takes advantage of this functionality, as described in this paper.