Summer Bridge Program
2003
Semra Bekele and I were assigned to Dr. Ken Johns' lab which is part of the University of Arizona's Experimental Elementary Particle Physics Group. This lab is one of many around the world working on Fermilab's D0 (Dee Zero) project involving the collision of protons and antiprotons. One of the objects of this project is to find evidence of the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson is the particle believed to impart mass to other particles. This lab designs and builds the circuitry necessary for the muon triggers which determine when and if data from particle collisions should be recorded.
Our first assignment was to design a printed circuit board that will use JTAG (IEEE std. 1149.1) technology to test the continuity of circuits on the Muon Trigger Card. This is a 9U or 40cm square printed circuit board containing numerous circuits, devices and connectors, which would be difficult if not impossible to test any other way. It took us less than a month to complete the design of the board using PowerLogic and PowerPCB CAD programs.
After this we were assigned different tasks. I was asked to write a program that would combine and convert netlists produced by PowerLogic and PowerPCB into netlists in Telesis (standard Allegro) format that could be read by Corelis' ScanPlus used by Ferilab for boundary scan testing. Approximately one week later I finished a 1000 line C++ program which produced the desired result. My next project involved a C program that would write data to and read data from transmitter memory modules located on a Muon Trigger Test Card. The processor has limited memory, so the main problem was writing a program that would not cause the system to fail from memory overload. This was also completed prior to the end of the Bridge Program on August 1st. I have been given other programming assignments which will lead toward testing various boards through a simulation of a D0 run.
Click here to learn about Fermilab
To learn more try particleadventure.org
Try here for some one-page explanations of the Higgs Boson
Acknowledgements
We would like thank Dr. Anthony Pitucco, Dr. Robert Thews, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) for giving us the opportunity to participate in the Bridge Program this summer. We would also like to thank Dr. Erwin Sucipto, John Lawvere, and James Little for their work in the program. Our thanks to Dr. William Bickle for his introduction to the tools in his physics department machine shop. Semra Bekele and I are especially indebted to Dr. Ken Johns, Mr. Joel Steinberg, Chris Leeman, and Carl Morgan of the EEPP lab for their kindness and direction while helping us to accomplish our assignments.
