  The Timepix particle tracking telescope has been developed as part of the
LHCb VELO Upgrade project, supported by the Medipix Collaboration and the AIDA
framework. It is a primary piece of infrastructure for the VELO Upgrade project
and is being used for the development of new sensors and front end technologies
for several upcoming LHC trackers and vertexing systems. The telescope is
designed around the dual capability of the Timepix ASICs to provide information
about either the deposited charge or the timing information from tracks
traversing the 14 x 14mm matrix of 55 x 55 um pixels. The rate of reconstructed
tracks available is optimised by taking advantage of the shutter driven readout
architecture of the Timepix chip, operated with existing readout systems.
Results of tests conducted in the SPS North Area beam facility at CERN show
that the telescope typically provides reconstructed track rates during the beam
spills of between 3.5 and 7.5 kHz, depending on beam conditions. The tracks are
time stamped with 1 ns resolution with an efficiency of above 98% and provide a
pointing resolution at the centre of the telescope of 1.6 um . By dropping the
time stamping requirement the rate can be increased to 15 kHz, at the expense
of a small increase in background. The telescope infrastructure provides CO2
cooling and a flexible mechanical interface to the device under test, and has
been used for a wide range of measurements during the 2011-2012 data taking
campaigns.
