The Muon Front-End Control Electronics of the LHCb Experiment

The LHCb muon readout apparatus is made of 1368 Multi-Wire Proportional Chambers (MWPC) and 24 Gas Electron Multiplier (GEM) chambers connected to 7632 16-channel front-end boards, resulting in 122.112 channels to be read out. After a pp collision, all the resulting signals must be read within 25 ns, before the next collision. The large-scale of the system and the time constrains naturally led to the development of a custom and complex control system made of about 600 microcontrollers (μC) and 150 flash-based FPGAs which are directly connected to the front-end electronics and handled by six computers. Besides configuring and monitoring the on-chamber readout electronics, a set of calibration and debugging oriented procedures have been developed to measure the noise, to time align and to assess the connection chains of every single channel of the detector. This document presents and describes the electronics developed to this purpose.