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OK, so I skipped a week. Mostly I have been getting the logistics of
board production together. We have tracked down and ordered (virtually)
every IC needed for the motherboard as well as the daughtercards. I'd
like to express my appreciation to Ann David and Jack Bardakian (BU) for
their help with the purchase orders.
Unfortunately, a couple more hard to find parts showed up: the PM7226GP
DAC that sets the thresholds and the MAX901-BCPE comparator that
converts the NIM control signals to TTL. We have back ordered them and
they are due in 6 to 8 weeks. If everything goes well, we should have
boards available for stuffing before then. In that case I will socket
those chips: we can QC test the boards by swapping the handful of chips
I have on hand. But hopefully, the chips will come in early. My previous
long lead time chip (F100325PC) came in after 8 weeks instead of 12.
As you can see, the probable production date for the motherboard is
early June. I have finished stuffing the production prototype and
ferreted out a few bridges on the fine-pitch smt parts. Hopefully, this
will be the last wfd to ever be hand assembled. The board looks good so
far- I can read/write from VME and the ASIC seems to put in valid data.
I'll be continuing checkout this week and hopefully by Friday I will
know that all is OK and I can ask the PCB fabricator to turn the crank
and produce 80 more.
The daughtercard is lagging slightly. We have just ordered the
production prototype and it is due by this Friday.
Phil Green stopped in for a brief look-around whil attending a
conference in Boston. He *will* be at the Texas meeting and he is
planning some time at Gran Sasso in late June.
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WFD MEETINGS at Corpus Christi:
We should take the opportunity to get together and work out our plans
for this summer. I propose two meetings. First, let's have a general
pre-meeting on Sunday. If people have presentations they would like
to make at the pre-meeting, please let me know so I can make an agenda.
I will review the status of the design and production from my end.
I would appreciate updates on: status of noise studies, plans for wfd qc
testing, analysis of waveforms taken in March, status of support hardware
(LIP, stop-master). If you are giving the same talk in the general session,
you don't necessarily have to duplicate it- you can summarize or go into
detail you wouldn't otherwise. It's up to you.
I would also like to have a planning session for wfd readout. We have
made some progress, but we still have a long way to go. In particular, I
would like to hear concrete proposals for what data we read out for each
trigger or combination of triggers. From this starting point, we can
evaluate the daq hardware we will use. It is not cast in stone yet, but
it will be soon. For starters, you should assume a uVaX plus VIC-8250
system as we have now configured.
Let's schedule the second meeting at the first meeting. If time and
interest permits, we can just continue at the first.
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