Introduction

This document describes the SURF board. The SURF board is one component of the pixel module burn-in system. The other components are the burn-in shell AMBUSH, documented at http://pixdata.lbl.gov/~surf/, and the burn-in data viewer, documented at (blah -- have to ask Lukaš for documentation).

An important consideration in the design of the pixel-module burn-in system was to make the integration into existing pixel setups easy. The only new piece of hardware required for the burn-in system is the SURF (Supply and Readout/Fanout) board. The SURF board fans out control from a TPCC to four modules, multiplexes data returned by the modules and provides power and high voltage to the modules. It also provides slow controls -- setting analog and digital supply voltages for each module and reading back currents and temperatures -- through a USB interface.

This document is structured as follows. Ch. 2 describes the SURF board from a user's perspective. The chapter deals with elementary matters:

• what sits where on the board; and
• what connector should connect to what.

It also covers more involved topics:

• how to download firmware into the board, what jumpers to load on a new board, what kluges need to be applied to a new board to make it work; and
• how the board signals that it's unhappy, what diagnostic tools exist to figure out what is making the board unhappy, and how to use the diagnostic tools to make the board happy again.

For the benefit of the designers of future generations of burn-in systems, Ch. 3 describes the components of the SURF board and the firmware that runs them. This section should help with isolating hardware and firmware bugs that might eventually pop up.