Proposal for a readout driver card for the ATLAS Insertable B-Layer

An additional inner layer for the existing ATLAS Pixel Detector, called Insertable B-Layer (IBL), is under design and it will be installed by Phase I. New front-end readout ASICs fabrication (FE-I4) will replace the previous chips in this layer. The new system features higher readout speed — 160Mb/s per ASIC — and simplified control. The current data acquisition chains are composed of front-end and readout chips, Back-Of-Crate (BOCs) cards and ReadOut Driver cards (RODs). This paper presents a proposal for the new ROD board, which implements modern FPGAs and high-speed links with the detector and with the ATLAS TDAQ system.