Although a hybrid with one or more APVs, maybe connected to a silicon detector, does not take much space, the surrounding electronic control and readout modules fill up a rack and also a computer is needed for the data acquisition. Thus, the development of such a chip test system is challenging itself.
Since many of the final readout components described in chapter ![[*]](crossref.gif)
were
not available in the past years (and some still are not), the Electronics II group at HEPHY
decided to build a system on their own.
The modular VME based system we use now has been developed and refined over years. Finally,
after a few iterations, it is scalable and extremely powerful. Only the final system
will be described in the following sections, although it was not yet available to its
full extent for earlier tests.
The data acquisition and analysis software, which I entirely wrote on my own, was improved together with the hardware. While it originally was a simple text-based program confined to a special hardware, it has evolved to a fully configurable DAQ system with advanced online analysis and a graphical user interface (GUI). Only the cooperation of hardware and software features reveals the full power of such a test system.
