Engineering: Major electronics system to unravel the mysteries of the Universe

The CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in Oxfordshire has successfully delivered a major electronics system, called the Tracker FED Readout, for the latest project at the European Centre for Particle Physics, CERN, in Geneva. The system will process the vast quantities of data to be generated by the world's largest silicon tracking detector - part of the international Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) facility at CERN. The CMS experiment will be used to study the conditions in the Universe just after the Big Bang.

The new electronics system, designed and developed by the CCLRC in collaboration with UK universities and manufactured in partnership with UK industry, comprises hundreds of complex electronics boards called Front End Driver (FED) boards.

Dr John Coughlan, FED Project Manager at RAL, said, "The collaboration with the manufacturing company, Exception EMS Ltd, has been excellent. The company has responded tremendously well to the challenge of the complexity of the board design and has maintained the required high quality of manufacture over several months of production. This has been a fine example of knowledge transfer with UK industry."

The electronics boards fill a large room, and will be installed next to the giant CMS experiment in a cavern 100 metres underground. The system exploits the latest electronics techniques in massively parallel digital processing whereby many millions of channels are processed simultaneously using specially programmed chips.

The main job of the new boards is to receive data from the silicon detectors inside the CMS main detector. Each particle collision, or event, produces about 10,000,000 Bytes of silicon detector data and an individual board will handle 3,000,000,000 Bytes of data each second. The whole system processes the equivalent of the contents of 2,000 CDs every second and must operate around the clock for several months at a time each year!

Phillip Jackson, Managing Director, Exception EMS Ltd, said, "It is a joy to work closely with all our customers and certainly that is our experience with the CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory on the CMS FED project. The spirit of co-operation and teamwork has been as good as I can recall."

Notes for editors

How the Front End Driver (FED) system works

40 million particle collisions will occur every second inside CMS. A trigger system selects 100,000 of those collisions each second as interesting events and these are fed through to the FED electronics boards as laser light pulses along huge bundles of optical fibres. 40,000 optical fibres in bundles that are 70 metres long carry data from the CMS detector to racks of FED boards in another cavern which, like the detector, is also 100 metres underground.

The FED boards keep only the useful information in each event, extracting data from just the silicon strips in the tracking detector that have registered particle hits. This reduces the amount of information recorded by over 90%. Each FED board corresponds to a specific part of the CMS tracker, and so when the output from each FED board is passed through a switch system, the data is assembled and combined to create a picture of the whole particle collision inside CMS.

The team designing and producing the FED boards have had to think of everything - if the particle events are different to predictions, the team will need to reprogramme the algorithms the board uses to process the data. This is achieved by using clever commercial chips called FPGAs - Field Programmable Gate Arrays - in the board design.

Facts and figures

Each FED board measures approximately 40 cm by 40 cm. The FED system is installed in 36 crates housed in 12 large racks of electronics in total measuring some 10 metres wide by one metre deep and three metres tall. The electronics will be installed in stages. The first quarter system will be installed on the surface to test the Silicon Tracker Detector as it is assembled. The remaining electronics will be installed in the underground caverns commencing in November 2006 until February 2007.

• FED system cost - two million pounds including the final electronics and prototyping systems.
• The project was funded by the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC). CMS member institutes contributed a large proportion of the electronics costs.
• The contract for manufacture of electronics was placed with the UK company, Exception EMS Ltd, following an EU wide tender process.
• FED system comprises 500 large and complex electronic boards in 12 person size racks filling a large room. The boards were designed and produced at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.
• The FED system will contain 15,000 computer chips called Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices.
• FED system will be installed 100 metres underground next to the LHC tunnel.
• FED system processes 10 million silicon detector channels 10,000 times every second.
• FED system processes the equivalent of 2,000 CDs worth of data every second.
• The Large Hadron Collider will operate about 12 hours per day for several months during each year.

The Large Hadron Collider(LHC) is a particle accelerator which will probe deeper into matter than ever before. It is the world's largest international physics collaboration and will help scientists to study the fundamental building blocks of our Universe, such as the nature of mass, the difference between matter and anti-matter and the search for 'dark matter'. The particle collisions in the LHC will recreate a tiny volume of the physical conditions which were present in the Universe just after the Big Bang. The LHC is located in a 27 kilometre circumference circular tunnel 100 metres beneath the Swiss-French border near Geneva. Due to switch on in 2007, it will ultimately collide beams of protons at energy of 14 TeV. Beams of lead nuclei will be also accelerated, smashing together with collision energy of 1150 TeV. 1 TeV is approximately the energy of motion of a flying mosquito. What makes the LHC so extraordinary is that it squeezes the energy into a space about a million million times smaller than a mosquito!

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is one of the major experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. It will be one of the world's biggest particle detectors when it starts taking data in 2007. A team of thousands of particle physicists, electronics engineers and construction experts have been building CMS, piece by piece, in locations all around the world before transporting them to CERN for assembly.

CERN is the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, the world's largest particle physics centre. It is located on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. It is a laboratory where scientists study the building blocks of matter and the forces that hold them together. Founded in 1954, CERN was one of Europe's first joint ventures and includes now 20 Member States. It exists primarily to provide scientists with the necessary tools to carry out their research. These tools include accelerators, which accelerate particles to almost the speed of light and detectors to make the particles visible.

The Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC) is one of eight UK research councils and is one of Europe's largest multidisciplinary research organisations supporting scientists and engineers across the world. It operates world-class large-scale research facilities, provides strategic advice to the government on their development and manages international research projects in support of a broad cross-section of the UK research community.

Partners in the Tracker FED Readout project

Exception EMS Ltd is a well established manufacturing services company based in Wiltshire, UK, supplying assembled products into the electronic market. Founded in 1948 by ex-RAF engineers, it specialises in providing complete, technically demanding electronic equipment solutions to the aerospace, military, transport and telecommunications sectors. Exception EMS Ltd won a European wide tender in 2004 to manufacture the FED boards for the CMS experiment at CERN. The company has worked closely with RAL throughout. The successful manufacture of the high quality boards won Exception EMS Ltd a CMS Industry Gold Award prize in March 2006.

Imperial College London designed the optical fibre test systems used to verify the operation of the FED boards. They also developed the software used for the industrial testing and have played a major role in the commissioning of the FED system and the management of the Tracker project at CERN.

Brunel University contributed to software simulations.

Further Information

Public material on the Tracker FED at RAL at: http://www.te.rl.ac.uk/esdg/cms-fed/public/
Public material on CERN and LHC at: http://http://press.web.cern.ch/public/
Public material on CMS at: http://cmsdoc.cern.ch/
The CCLRC website is at: http://www.cclrc.ac.uk/

For more information please contact:

Natalie Bealing, CCLRC Press and PR Manager, press@cclrc.ac.uk
Dr John Coughlan, FED Project Manager, CCLRC Technology, J.A.Coughlan@rl.ac.uk

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