LVDS tester: a systematic test of cable signal transmission at the ALICE experiment

In the ALICE experiment, the Low-Voltage Differential Signalling (LVDS) format is used for the transmission of trigger inputs from the detectors to the Central Trigger Processor (CTP), the L0 trigger outputs from Local Trigger Units (LTU) boards back to the detectors and the BUSY inputs from the sub-detectors to the CTP. ALICE has designed a set-up, called the LVDS transmission tester, that aims to measure various transmission quality parameters and the bit-error rate (BER) for long period runs in an automatic way. In this paper, this method is described and the conclusions from these tests for the ALICE LVDS cables are discussed.