Wafer screening of the front-end ASICs for ATLAS SCT

The continuous increase in volume of silicon trackers in the coming experiments poses a number of new issues to unravel. Among them, the high number of detector readout modules to be built in a relatively quick time will require the use of preselected ASICs. In the particular case of the ATLAS SCT, where about 6 million channels have to be read out with little chance for replacement of the electronics, that becomes a considerable challenge. Specific architecture features of the front-end chips will call for very specific and dedicated electronic testers to provide a full and efficient characterization. This paper describes the system built for the preselection and characterization of the ABCD front-end chip to be used in the readout of the ATLAS SCT microstrip silicon sensors. The system has been used successfully during the last year to tag the 6000 ABCD chips that have been built up to now and has been upgraded to cope with the new features of the last version of the chip.