The Mini-drift Tubes Front End ( MDT FE ) electronics is intended for use in the Forward Muon Tracking Detector, a subsystem of the FAMUS - Forward Angle Muon Spectrometer, which in turn is an essential part of the D0 detector. The D0 is one of the two detectors built for the Tevatron, (D0, CDF) a collider facility of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL), Batavia IL, USA. Beam collision period - 132 ns. Design of the MDT FE electronics is based on a common D0 strategy described as follows:

• deadtimeless data readout system;
• continuous digitization of the input data stream;
• continuous input hit map delivering to the first level trigger (L1 trigger);
• upon arrival from the L1 trigger of an L1 accept decision data is buffered into the L1 FIFO, read-out, formatted and transferred to the L2 and if needs to the L3 trigger;
• use of DSPs (Analog Devices) for data preprocessing and managing Level 2 and Level 3 data buffers;
• data digitization process is strongly synchronized to the beam crossings itself and beam crossings numbers; special care is taken to keep and check for synchronization;
• adjustable digital delays to accomodate Level 1 trigger latency, to compensate cable delays, to provide for global system synchronization;
• data are transmitted over high speed copper serial links (L1 Data for L1 trigger - 1 Gbit/sec, L2-L3 Data - 160 Mbit/sec);
• stand-alone read-out, calibration and test capabilities are included.

About 50,000 channels of mini-drift tubes (MDT) are supported. System performs a low resolution (18.8 ns/bin) measurement of drift time , improving the coordinate resolution of the tubes. The MDT FE electronics is housed in 24 9U VME FE crates, located on the D0 detector platform (Collision Hall). Each VME FE crate carries a VME master (VSB-20), MDT readout controller - MDRC and 10-12 digitizing cards - MDCs. All the FE crates are identical to each other and have only different addresses and software parameters sets. MDC supports 192 MDT channels, MDRC provides FE crate timing, data read-out via special high speed bus (J3), data formatting, data transmission and more.
(More see The muon system of the Run II DO detector)

@ D0 (DZero) Muon Electronics Homepage
@ MDT electronics
@ MDC Specification
@ MDRC Specification
@ MDT software