| The Photon Spectrometer, subsystem in A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE) of European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), requires a large number of data-acquiring modules to acquire signal from high-speed particle collision. To guarantee the batch FEE cards working normally in PHOS, testing for each card is necessary. It will have a great amount of work with low efficiency to test manually. To decrease the test difficulty, a test system is designed to handle the function test and error diagnosis in mass production.In this thesis, the test system is composed of a PC equipped with Virtual Instrument as host and an EZ-USB-based microcomputer controller as the slave computer. As communication between the Host and the Slave Computer is via USB bus, system architecture and data transmission types of USB are mentioned first. According to the test demand, system hardware scheme, embedded firmware of slave computer and host application software are proposed respectively. By using the program of embedded system, the bottom firmware is implemented with the foreground procedures: main-loop, background procedures: servings for interrupt. The coordination of the firmware program in the slave computer and the hardware insure the reliability and stabilization of the data transmission in the test system. The host application is developed by object-oriented language with friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI). It insures efficient data exchange with slave controller with smart control to field status. The FPGA chip in slave system can also be reconfigured by host PC flexibly.In mass production, the test system mentioned can be operated offline from the system bus of PHOS. All field statistics can transfer to host PC via USB link, which can be displayed in pellucid tables, stored/exported for farther scientific analysis. Compared with traditional manual testing, the test system reduces the cost sharply. |
