One of the clear areas of shortage of effort in the ATLAS pixel detector project is in the assembly of pixel modules and their testing to understand prototype detector performance and eventually to ensure high quality production pieces. ATLAS plans to assemble about 3000 modules over a two year period starting in early 2001. This amounts to about 6 full assemblies per working day. Currently the US groups are signed up to do one third of this assembly work or about 1000 modules.
There are relatively few sites in the US that are planning to get involved in this work (LBL for sure, OSU perhaps, Albany and Oklahoma maybe). One or two additional groups willing to work on this would be most welcome. We could imagine assembling about 200 modules. More details on what a module looks like and what assembly would be required can be found in a talk given by Gil at an ATLAS DOE review earlier this year. There are still some uncertainties as to exactly how much work would be involved.
A minimum to be able to effectively test assembled modules would be a VME teststation and some ability to make manual wire-bonds. Each module has about 300 conventional wirebonds to connect the control lines for the readout chips to the kapton readout hybrid. While it would be desirable to be able to make this with a fully automatic bonding machine (15-20 minutes per module?) even a manual bonder would be able to do this many bonds in a few hours (ie not a significant fraction of the 2-3 days one might imagine taking to assemble a module). A manual wire-bonder would be a necessity even if only testing was going on as there would always be the need to repair/replace suspicious bonds identified during the testing procedure.
In addition to the testing hardware a minimal testing station would require a dedicated physicist (postdoc full time) and a technician cable of fine mechanical assembly and (at least) manual wire-bonding. Those at the meeting could imagine setting up two such stations at two different sites in Canada.
The current schedule calls for production tooling R&D between now and the end of the year. During 2000 ATLAS expects to assemble in excess of 100 modules to fine tune the procedure. Full production will start in early 2001. The sets an aggressive time scale for new groups to get off the ground and participate in this work.