The development of a burn-in test station at Wits for the Phase-II upgrade of the Tile Calorimeter of the ATLAS experiment

Abstract

The University of the Witwatersrand is responsible for producing over 1200 Low Voltage Power Supply (LVPS) bricks to power the on-detector electronics of the Tile Calorimeter (TileCal) of the ATLAS detector in preparation for the Phase II upgrade. The LVPS brick is a DC/DC switch-mode power supply module that steps down a 200 VDC input to a 10 VDC output. Before being sent to CERN for installation, the LVPS bricks must undergo a quality assurance test. To ensure that these electronic devices meet the necessary standards for high-quality and reliability, the University of the Witwatersrand employs a burn-in test station that subjects them to electronic tests at elevated temperatures and other stressful conditions. The burn-in test station comprises of different Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs), each responsible for various functions, and a PIC microcontroller needs to be programmed for each board to perform its respective functions. An assembler MPLABX IDE and a compiler (CCS) are used for programming the PIC microcontroller, and the Labview software is used as the control program for the burn-in test station. A simulation was used in Proteus software to test the firmware functionality before programming the hardware. Preliminary results of the current version (version 8.4.2) of the LVPS brick are discussed.