The Control System of the ALICE Transition Radiation Detector at LHC: And the environment for Quality Assurance of its Front-End Electronics

Within this work, the detector control system (DCS) for the Transition Radiation Detector (TRD) of the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider has been developed. The TRD DCS is fully implemented as a detector oriented hierarchy of objects behaving as finite state machines. It controls and monitors over 65 thousand front-end electronics (FEE) units, a few hundred low voltage and one thousand high voltage channels, and other sub-systems such as cooling and gas. Commissioning of the TRD DCS took place during several runs with ALICE using cosmic events. Another part of this work describes the development of a test environment for large-scale production quality assurance of over 4 thousand FEE read-out boards containing in total about 1.2 million read-out channels. The hardware and software components are described in detail. Additionally, a series of performance studies were carried out earlier including radiation tolerance tests of the full-custom integrated circuit which is the core component of the TRD FEE.