  A recently approved ten-year extension of the BESIII experiment (IHEP,
Beijing) motivated an upgrade program for both the accelerator and the
detector. In particular, the current inner drift chamber is suffering from
aging and the proposal is to replace it with a detector based on the
cylindrical GEM technology. The CGEM inner tracker (CGEM-IT) consists of three
coaxial layers of triple GEM. The tracker is expected to restore efficiency,
improve z-determination and secondary vertex position reconstruction with a
spatial resolution of 130 {\mu} m in the xy-plane and better than 300 {\mu} m
along the beam direction. A dedicated readout system was developed. Signals
from the detector strips are processed by TIGER, a custom 64-channel ASIC that
provides an analog charge readout via a fully digital output up to about 50 fC,
less than 3 ns jitter. TIGER continuously streams over-threshold data in
trigger-less mode to an FPGA-based readout module, called GEM Read Out Card,
that organizes the incoming data by building the event packets when the trigger
arrives. Two of the three layers are in operation in Beijing since January 2020
remotely controlled. Due to the pandemic situation the integration activity has
been continued on a small-scale prototype. Recently, a test beam has been
performed at CERN with the final electronics configuration. In this
presentation, the general status of the CGEM-IT project will be presented with
a particular focus on the results from the test beam data acquisition.
