Design and test of the final ALICE SDD CARLOS end ladder board

The paper presents the design and test of the final prototype of the CARLOS (Compression And Run Length Encoding Subsystem) end ladder board that is going to be used in the ALICE experiment at CERN. This board is able to compress data coming from one Silicon Drift Detector (SDD) front-end electronics and to send them towards the data concentrator card CARLOSrx in counting room via a 800 Mb/s optical link. The board design faces several constraints, mainly size (54x49 mm) and radiation tolerance: for this reason the board contains several CERN developed ASICs. A test setup has been realized for selecting the good devices among the 500 cards already produced