SMX and front-end board tester for CBM readout chain

Abstract

A: The SMX chip is a front-end ASIC dedicated to the readout of STS and MUCH detectors in the CBM experiment. The production of the ASIC and the front-end boards based on it is just being started and requires thorough testing to assure quality. The paper describes the SMX tester based on a standard commercial Artix-7 FPGA module with an additional simple baseboard. In the standalone configuration, the tester is controlled via IPbus and enables full functional testing of connected SMX, FEB, or a full detector module. The software written in Python may easily be integrated with higher-level testing software.