A Front-End Test Stand for the Analog ASICs of the ATLAS LAr Calorimeter HL-LHC Upgrade

This paper describes the development of a common front-end test stand for the analog ASICs, which are part of the effort to develop the front-end electronics for the ATLAS LAr calorimeter HL-LHC (High Luminosity LHC) upgrade. The common test stand consists of the front-end test board, toy calorimeters, ASIC mezzanine boards and the DAQ system. The front-end test board is the bridge between the DAQ system and the ASIC mezzanine, it integrates two 16-channel ADCs for digitizing the outputs of the analog ASIC and a calibration pulse generator for detector signal injection. The analog ASICs under test are mounted on the ASIC mezzanine boards, their outputs are connected to the front-end test board through an FMC connector. A Xilinx ZC706 evaluation board is utilized as the DAQ board for this test stand, a Gigabit Ethernet link is implemented on the DAQ board for slow control, configuration and ADC data transmission. The tests of two front-end analog ASICs with this test stand are ongoing. The preliminary test results demonstrated that this test stand is suitable for the testing of the multi-channel analog ASICs developed for the LAr Calorimeter HL-LHC upgrade.