The Calorimeter Readout Card of the LHCb experiment

LHCb, one of the four particle physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN will perform studies of CP-symmetry violation and rare decays of B-hadrons. The main purpose of the calorimeter system (which is made of four sub-detectors) is the selection and identification of hadrons, electrons and photons, and the measurement of their energies and directions. The calorimeter front-end crate is a standard 9U VME. In each crate, up to 16 front-end boards and a single Calorimeter Readout Card, called CROC, are connected. The front-end boards perform the acquisition of the detector channels. The CROC is the board which gathers the front-end data of a calorimeter crate and sends them through optical fibres to the LHCb Data Acquisition. The CROC also provides the clock, trigger signal, broadcast and experiment control commands for all the boards in a crate.