Robotic testing system operation for electrical characterization of ECON integrated circuits in the CMS High Granularity Calorimeter

The High-Granularity Calorimeter (HGCAL) is a planned replacement of the endcap calorimeters for the High Luminosity upgrade of the CMS detector. As part of HGCAL's data readout hardware, Endcap CONcentrator ASICs (ECON ASICs) allow for the selection or compression of proton-proton interaction data. There are two ECON ASIC variants: ECON-T for processing data on the trigger path and ECON-D for processing data on the data acquisition (DAQ) path. ECON-T receives trigger primitive information from the charge digitizing HGCROC ASIC at a rate of 40MHz, and selects or compresses the data using one of five user-selectable algorithms. ECON-D processes full event information from the HGCROCs for all events passing the Level-1 trigger at a maximum rate of 750 kHz.

The full HGCAL detector requires 27k ECON-D and 20k ECON-T passing strict specifications on a variety of parameters including operating voltage, clock frequency, power consumption, input and output jitter, and logical functionality. A robotic ASIC testing system at the Fermilab Microelectronics Division is used to select the 47k ECON ASICs satisfying HGCAL requirements. Approximately eight trays of 90 packaged ECONs are placed on a flat, stable surface. A robotic gantry moves each ECON via light vacuum suction system to one of two test sockets where it is subjected to a battery of tests taking approximately three minutes. The resulting test data are stored as a .json file format and uploaded to a database for analysis. This talk will focus on the details of operating the robotic transportation system, namely: initialization procedures, individual robot functions programmed as LabVIEW instances, and the means by which the robot locates trays and identifies individual ECONs for transport to and from the testing circuitry.