Development and Characterization of Readout Electronics for a Monolithic Active Pixel Sensor

The ALPIDE is a radiation detector developed for the upgrade of the ALICE experiment at CERN. To be able to characterize this detector, and to do radiation measurements with it outside the ALICE environment, an easy to use readout system is needed. The work done in this thesis covers the design and development of a readout system for a single ALPIDE. In doing so various readout solutions have been discussed laying the foundation for specific readout system requirements. Particular emphasis was put on two VHDL modules which were developed to give a physical abstraction layer when interfacing with the ALPIDE. Both modules were implemented on an FPGA, and a complete readout system was realized. This readout system was successfully tested, and cluster size formation in the ALPIDE was studied using a radioactive source. The developed system had some shortcomings, notably handling the 320 Mb/s data transmitted from the ALPIDE. Here a continuous data transmission would result in a FIFO overflow