Production and commissioning performance tests of the read-out driver boards for the hadronic tile calorimeter of the ATLAS detector at the LHC

The ATLAS hadronic tile calorimeter detector (TileCal) is an iron-scintillating tiles sampling calorimeter designed to operate at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerator at CERN. The central element of the back-end system of the TileCal detector is a 9U VME read-out driver (ROD) board. The operation of the TileCal calorimeter requires a total of 32 ROD boards. We report here on the overall electrical performance of the ROD boards during their production phase and during their first operation at the ATLAS commissioning setup at CERN. We report also on the real time operation and performance of the ROD digital signal processors (DSPs) on the first cosmic data runs taken at the commissioning setup. The DSP operation is based on the use of optimal filtering algorithms for the signal amplitude, pedestal and time online reconstruction and which, in addition, monitor the quality of the reconstructions.