Design and testing of an sTGC ASIC interface board for the ATLAS New Small Wheel upgrade

The ATLAS experiment will replace the present small wheel (SW) detector with a new small wheel detector (NSW) aiming to improve the performance of muon triggering and precision tracking in the endcap region at the high-luminosity LHC. small-strip thin gap chamber (sTGC) is one of the two new detector technologies used in this upgrade. A few custom-designed ASICs are needed for the sTGC detector. An sTGC ASIC interface board is designed to test ASIC-to-ASIC communication and to validate the functionality of the entire system. A test platform with the final readout system is set up and the whole sTGC readout chain is demonstrated for the first time. Key parameters in the readout chain are discussed and the results are shown.