Reliability and Redundancy of an Embedded System used in the Detector Control System of the ALICE Experiment

ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) ulitlizes the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European laboratory for particle physics, CERN. This thesis decribes an embedded System designed for the Detector Control System (DCS) for ALICE. It is employed as interface layer between detector hardware and control environment. It is based on a hardware with a dedicated CPU combined with an FPGA running a standard or real time linux operating system.

The flexibility of the hardware platform is used to adapt the board to 9 different detectors in 18 variants. Apart from versatiliy, the system should be operated with improved reliabilty in the radiation environment. This is achieved by a selftest system to estimate a failure rate in addition to redundancy on board level. The combination of multiple boards in detectors (540 for the TRD) increases communication and functional redundancy by interconnections.