A Scalable Data Acquisition System for the CALICE Tile Hadron Calorimeter

Abstract

The data acquisition system for a highly granularAnalogue Hadron Calorimeter (AHCAL) for the future InternationalLinear Collider (ILC) will be presented. The developedDAQ chain has several stages of aggregation and scales up to4 million channels in the main barrel foreseen for the AHCALdesign. The front-end electronics will be embedded in the detectorlayers in between absorber plates without active cooling. TheILC has a specific timing of less than 1 ms of a spill with 2820bunches followed by 199 ms of idle time used for slow readout,which allows the detector to be operated in power-pulsing modein order to meet the power dissipation budget. This timing isreflected in the architecture of the DAQ from the very front-endASIC embedded in the detector layers between absorber plates tothe largest aggregation device, the Link Data Aggregator, whichhas 96 HDMI connectors matching the AHCAL steel absorberplate spacing, four Kintex7 FPGAs and a central Zynq SystemOn-Chip.The DAQ meets the ILC timing and bandwidth, whichwill be shown. The same DAQ is used also for AHCAL prototypebeam tests, which require rather continuous data taking. TheDAQ architecture, data flow, timing and performance will bepresented in detail. The performance has been demonstrated inrecent beam tests at the CERN SPS in 2015 and at DESY in2016