The Renaissance: A test-stand for the Forward CMS Pixel Tracker assembly

The CMS Forward Pixel Tracker will consist of two end-cap blocks, each made of two disks lodging sensors and Read-Out Chips (ROCs) (grouped into plaquettes of different sizes) for a total of about 18 million read-out channels. During the assembly phase, prior to the physical mounting of the plaquettes on the disks a thorough electronic test is necessary to check each channel for functionality, noise level, required threshold trimming and bump-bond quality. To this extent a complete test-stand system, based on custom PCI cards and specialized software, has been developed. Different methods have been evaluated and implemented to electronically assess the amount of malfunctioning bump-bonds. Determination of the correct parameters for initialization of the ROCs has also been implemented as an automatic procedure; data are finally fed into a centralized database for subsequent retrieval during detector initialization or for off-line analysis. In this paper we describe requirements, design and implementation of such a system, which is currently in use at the Silicon Detector Facility (SiDet) Laboratory of FNAL for the final assembly of the Forward Tracker system.