FY99Q2
Jan-Mar 1999

Significant areas of progress during the quarter included:

• reaching two Director's milestones:

• Muon Forward Tracker MDT Assembly 10% Complete
• (Fiber Tracker) Assembly Design Complete

• delivery of the trigger framework to Fermilab

Areas of concern continued to center on:

• vendor production rate and delivery of good silicon detectors.
• vendor production and delivery of flexible circuits for both the silicon and fiber trackers.

Vendor problems are discussed in more detail in the individual sub-project reports. Discussions with current vendors continued. Several steps were taken in an attempt to speed up silicon detector production, testing, and delivery, including the re-direction of a portion of the F-disk detector production to a different vendor. Flex circuits from several alternate vendors were received, and are being tested. Because of the resulting schedule delays, a comprehensive re-evaluation of the schedule began.

The lower power-lead splice-joint was weld-spliced in January as anticipated after the September 1998 tests revealed a resistive splice. The magnet is now capable of being energized and there are plans to do so in the next quarter. Work continued on U-tubes and other parts of the cryo-system that will be installed in the DØ collision hall, and parts for the helium purifier are being accumulated.

Hall probes used in the September 1998 power tests and field mapping are undergoing alignment checks in a test magnet with a rather uniform field. After realignment of the radial and axial probes, a more precise set of field mapping measurements is anticipated. NIKHEF, a relatively new member of the collaboration, is working on the development of an in-situ set of Hall probes that will remain in the experiment during data taking.

The Be beam pipe was ordered in November 1998, and design of the forward shielding is 90% complete. Procurements for the lead, polyethylene, and shielding supports are in the bid process or close to it.

Good quality high-density-interconnect (HDI) circuits from Dyconex have been stuffed and are being used to construct the first 2^o stereo ladders suitable for installation into DØ. Procedures should be fully understood within a month, and additional personnel will be needed in order to satisfy construction rates dictated by the roll-in schedule. Developing and testing fixtures for construction of 90^o -stereo ladders is underway.

All beryllium parts are in hand or scheduled for receipt by late spring. All fixtures for ladder and wedge production also either exist or should be completed on a similar time schedule. Touch-probe methods have been developed for in-situ measurement of ladders and F-Disks. Probe and optical measurements made on ladders and a variety of test setups now agree to within five microns.

A readout system with the final sequencer/1553/VRB/VBD configuration is running smoothly, and software development continued in preparation for the upcoming 10% system test. Six of eight test setups based on simplified stand-alone sequencers (SAS) are operational, and the remaining two will be running within weeks. Sufficient SAS and interface cards to handle all production testing will be operational by summer.

An interface-card project expanded to include all cabling, monitoring, and required power, and installation has just begun under the joint leadership of DØ's silicon and electronics teams. The goal is to fully define requirements and commence design by mid-summer.

Low-mass cable design continued. A serpentine version was received from Speedy Circuits and a straight eight-foot version from Allied Signal (Kansas City). Preliminary tests indicated that the straight version works and is preferred, and that associated miniature coax and higher-mass flat cables appeared to work with 2% cross-talk.

Ribbon fabrication prototyping continued. Ribbons were fabricated for mounting on cylinder 3a and final connectorization tooling is being debugged. Edge fiber problems and adhesive flash problems appear to be solved with the new tooling. Optical tests were made with the first full prototypes of connectorized samples with curved connectors and an average light-coupling efficiency of approximately 85% was obtained. All barrel-3 Torlon connectors were received, checked, and met specifications, and the connector orders were placed for barrels 8 and 7. VLPC testing neared completion, with approximately 120,000 channels tested. Boeing estimates completion by the beginning of June. Mandrels for cylinders 7 and 8 were received and accepted, and the fabrication of carbon-fiber support cylinder 8 began. Ribbon tests on a 12" diameter cylinder were completed. Following the installation of the final mechanical safety devices on the mounting machine and some programming work, final mounting tests will begin on cylinder 3a.

Ten pre-production VRB's and VTM's were delivered. The Fermilab Computing Division Electronics Group tested a fully populated crate and discovered some noise problems on the VRB back-plane control bus. These were associated with the transmission of the physics data from the VTM through the back-plane to the VRB. Several solutions are being studied. Although the problems do not appear difficult to fix, the rest of production will not proceed until a solution is found. The 10% detector test is now running regularly with about a half-crate of readout electronics. An independent VRB acceptance test is planned for early April. A cable cross-talk problem was discovered during the 10% test that requires a small modification to the sequencer boards. The modification consists of adding a second driver chip. Since the chip cannot be put on the existing boards due to space constraints, another round of prototypes will be made before proceeding with final production. The production order of twenty-five stand-alone sequencers arrived and seven were checked out. The manufacturer did an excellent job - there were no errors in the first seven boards. More boards will be checked out when additional requests are made.

Design changes were implemented based on test results from the last quarter. All elements are being assembled for a 5,000-channel test. This includes: preamps, preamp motherboards, preamp power supplies, calibration pulser, and a limited number of BLS-shaper channels. About 6,000 pieces of the latest 6-inch Orbit SCAs have been packaged and are under test - initial results on small quantities are promising. Delays in the testing of these new devices have been due to problems with the testers and shortage of technical support. Further tests (temperature and mechanical stress relief) of the original 4-inch SCAs have not yielded any better understanding of the low yields. Long-term burn-in of batches of 50 SCAs is underway, and initial tests on the 6-inch line are promising, whereas the first (preliminary) test of the 4-inch devices may indicate problems with infant mortality. However, this still must be verified. There is an overall slippage in the schedule due, in many cases, to limited manpower. Elements of the calorimeter software continue to be written.

The ICD scintillator was delivered to Fermilab from the vendor. Machining of the isolation grooves began at Lab 8, and the first twelve of forty tiles received injections of titanium dioxide-loaded epoxy into their grooves. Further studies of tile/fiber configurations were made to boost the light yield of the detectors and thereby offset some of the signal loss in the fiber cables. Three-fiber and double-ended readout configurations were studied. Clean-room construction began at the University of Texas-Arlington (UTA) to provide an area for tile/fiber assembly, and three large assembly tables were made for use in the room. Final improvements were made to the connector polisher and very satisfactory results were obtained.

At Louisiana Tech, improvements were made to the design of the motherboard, and a scheme was developed to use the calorimeter pulser system, with small modifications, for the ICD. A few high-voltage bases were made and their characteristics studied. Lastly, a decision was made to use the muon scintillator LED calibration system design for the ICD system.

All of the ninety-four WAMUS PDT's are now installed on the detector. New service cards, delay boards, and gas fittings have been installed on sixty of them, and installation of these components continued. The prototype front-end and control boards were moved onto a PDT located on the detector, and read-out into prototype electronics in the counting house is underway. This marks the beginning of real commissioning of the WAMUS system.

All 1500 A-layer counters were delivered to Fermilab from IHEP and are undergoing final testing. All 1500 C-layer counters were produced by IHEP and have been shipped. Most of the parts needed for the production of pixel octants (including mounts and calibration system) are available except for the frames scheduled for delivery to Fermilab in April. Production line assembly of octants is now scheduled to begin in late April.

1200 MDT's were produced. However production was then halted due to lack of some needed components. Work continued on solving gas leaks at the end-cap weld. A new delivery schedule of tubes from Dubna was set with the first large batch (five octants) due in May and the final batch scheduled for delivery in October. The design of the MDT octant frames was completed and honeycomb panels were ordered from industry. Work continued on finalizing details of the low voltage and high voltage buses and the gas system.

Prototype testing of the scintillator front-end board and MDT front-end board and readout controller neared completion. The layout of the full 24-channel PDT front-end board was completed and sent out for fabrication.

The Trigger Framework was delivered to Fermilab in February. It is now located in the first floor of the Moving Counting House and connections to it are being made. Running from a temporary installation of the Trigger Control Computer, the Framework passed its "Connectivity" test and "Single Chance" test programs. Connection to the Master Clock system began and details about the connection to the Serial Command Link hub-end are being worked out. Prototype modules for the hub-end of the Serial Command Link were received in March and the first testing of these modules is underway. Because of a desire to have more flexibility in the logic performed by the And-Or Network Modules in the Trigger Framework, work began in late March to replace these modules. No change to the circuit board etch in these modules is required. The only change will be the replacement of their main array FPGA's by parts that have three to four times the capacity, are five times faster, and are slightly less expensive than the originals. Current plans call for the re-use of the original And-Or Network Modules as part of the readout system for the Level 1 Calorimeter Trigger.

The mechanical design of the Luminosity Monitor enclosures was completed and the first enclosure is being fabricated in the Brown University machine shop. These enclosures will house the already-completed Luminosity Monitor counters (plastic scintillator with fine-mesh phototube readout), the preamplifiers for the phototube signals, and the LED light sources for monitoring and calibration. Testing of a prototype for the phototube preamplifier began, and various design options for the LED light source were studied.

The Luminosity Monitor electronics was reviewed by the Electronics Certification Board. No significant design changes are expected following the review. Procurement began for the CAFE cards, a central component in the Luminosity Monitor electronics design. These cards were developed by CDF for their calorimeter electronics, but are well suited to providing the fast charge integration, digitization, and calibration via lookup table needed for the DØ Luminosity Monitor timing and pulse-height measurements. Prototype tests of the analog front-end electronics that will drive the CAFE cards proceeded, and substantial progress was made in developing the FPGA logic that is needed to buffer and process the output of the cards.

The Level 1 Calorimeter upgrade design and specification has commenced. The prospect of calorimeter/preshower spatial matching at Level 1 has received increased attention as simulations show matching to be an excellent source of rejection. The Level 1 Muon system has reached the final layout and prototyping stage. The Level 1 Central Tracking Trigger has undergone major modification in response to a call for increased capabilities. The new design splits the front-end functionality into an analog card and a separate digital card. The digital card is used throughout the triggering system for trigger calculation and concentration. This modularity simplifies the provision of trigger terms to the central tracking Level 1 and Level 2 clients. The Level 1 preshower triggers also benefit from this modularity. Specifications for the preshower front-end have been established and these are presently being incorporated into the analog front-end designs.

The Level 2 system technical design reports for Components, Global, and Calorimeter received positive reviews by the Collaboration, with no major changes required for prototype boards. Prototypes for the Alpha board, Fiber Input Converter (FIC), and Second Level Input Computer (SLIC) were produced and are being tested. Core functionality of all devices except the commercial VME interface was demonstrated and purchase of crates began. VME interface cards continued to be prototyped. Power supply requirements were studied, with purchases scheduled to begin next quarter. Interaction with the Online group began in earnest, and work on prototype displays started.

Trigger simulation work continued, but was manpower-limited. Level 2 software is now in the standard code repository, with a first official release scheduled during the next quarter. Resources have been added to the test stand, and the Serial Command Link Fanout design was generalized to allow testing to proceed during data taking. Changes to the specified inputs for the Level 2 Preshower and Level 2 Central Tracking Trigger crates continued.

A major step was achieved with the transfer of data from digitizing crates through the newly installed data acquisition elements to the host online system. The existence of this path provides a basis for the development and deployment of much online software. In addition to calorimeter readout, readout paths for the muon electronics also were installed. Brown University provided several additional systems to DØ for this work. Preparations for the coordinated readout of multiple crates and for the interaction with the hardware triggers continued. The silicon electronics test continued to be active, successfully employing a special high-speed readout to the Level 3 node. Locally, test installations for board maintenance were retooled to the specifications of the Run 2 system, additional system hardware was purchased to support the Brown University development setup, and design work continued in preparation for the DØ Review in April. Additionally, much work was accomplished on the Level 3 trigger's data handling framework for the filter algorithms.

The Online System added personnel and made progress in the areas of data acquisition and controls. A Fermilab Associate Scientist has joined the group as the head of the DAQ monitoring effort and a Fermilab post-doc has joined the Controls group concentrating on the High Voltage control system. A new hire for the Online system manager position began work, and a new member of the Computing Division/ODS Department is spending half-time on DØ DAQ issues.

On 5 Mar 99 a demonstration was set up to trigger a calorimeter crate with a pulser, read that crate out via the VBD into a Level 3 VRC, then transmit the "event" over the network to the Data Distributor running on the Host. The Data Distributor further sent the events to both a Linux client (EXAMINE) and an OSF1 client. The Level 3 VRC was controlled locally, while the Host applications were controlled from an NT personal computer in the control room. Alternatively, the data were directed to a Data Logger and written to disk. This system demonstrated the integrated workings of the principal components of the Run II event data path, satisfying milestones for Level 3 readout, data logging, and event monitoring. Progress also was made on defining the interaction of the DAQ processes for startup, run control, error handling, and shutdown.

A graphical user interface for control of the rack monitor interface (monitor of power, temperature, water flow, water leaks in a rack) has been demonstrated. A development ORACLE database has been installed on the Online host cluster. A prototype hardware database, from which the EPICS control system database is extracted, has been created and is under study. Alarms have been generated and displayed using the EPICS system.

The following table lists DoE (M1) and Director's (M2) milestones whose baseline dates fall before the end of the second quarter of FY99. (Milestones reached prior to the second quarter have been deleted from the list.). Two Director's milestones were met during the quarter and four were not met.

This section presents a table summarizing the reported Fermilab technical effort during the quarter for each WBS Level 2 Subsystem. This includes reported effort from various engineering and technical teams and technical centers at Fermilab, but does not include physicist or project management effort. Units are in FTEs per quarter. CP - Computing Professional, DES - Designer/Drafter, EE - Electrical Engineer, ET - Electrical Tech, ME - Mechanical Engineer, MT - Mechanical Tech.

The second quarter of fiscal year 1999 closed with obligations for the DØ Upgrade Project totaling $2,636K on equipment M&S funds and $297K on Solenoid AIP Plant funds. As shown in the following plot, obligations fell short of planned equipment M&S spending by $1,142K. The Project's spending plan was developed at the end of the second quarter and will require further analysis to determine where the shortfall in spending originates. Appropriate changes to the spending plan may be made as the details are reviewed.

During the second quarter, Cost Estimate change requests were submitted and approved as part of a "bottoms-up" re-evaluation of the current Cost Estimate. Due to the re-evaluation, the Estimate-to-Complete (ETC) the Upgrade is equal to the current Project Balance of $9.748K, but this will change as spending continues during the final two quarters. Furthermore, the overall Contingency Performance is going to show a rate of contingency usage of 0%. In other words, based on the re-evaluated cost and contingency estimate as well as the completion percentage of each Sub-Project at the end of the second quarter, DØ currently appears to have saved 100% of the contingency estimated on items already purchased.

The Project currently has commitments with universities and other institutions in the DØ Collaboration, via active Memoranda of Understanding (MoU), totaling $7,653K. These funds constitute an obligation on the part of the DØ Upgrade Project and are regularly costed each month through invoices that are received as work is completed. The institutions involved and a more detailed breakdown of the commitments and costs are shown in the following table.