The Versatile Link+ Demo Board (VLDB+)

Abstract

Abstract The Versatile Link Plus Demonstrator Board (VLDB+) is a board designed by CERN’s EP-ESE group to provide an evaluation kit for the Versatile Link Plus ecosystem (VL+). This reference design gathers three custom and radiation hard devices, namely, the Low-Power Gigabit Transceiver (lpGBT), the Versatile Link Plus Transceiver (VTRx+) and the FEASTMP DC-DC converters. These components are common to some of the HL-LHC experiments and constitute the main elements of the board. The VLDB+ is already being extensively used by several experiments to get acquainted with the whole ecosystem in order to facilitate their final front-end system design. In this article, all the features of the board together with the external system used for its control are described. Furthermore, a few performance results are shown and a brief status of the project is presented.