22 nd International Symposium on Space Terahertz Technology, Tucson, 26-28 April 2011 Abstract— The Atacama Large Millimeter/Sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) will be composed of at least 65 high-precision antennas. In this framework, IRAM is responsible for the production (component procurement, assembly and test) of 65 production + 8 spare state-of-the-art receivers, covering the 275- 373GHz frequency range, called the ALMA Band 7 cartridges. Some of the challenging issues that were solved during the design and prototyping of the cartridge, and early experimental results were presented at a previous ISSTT. The first production cartridge was delivered in Spring 2009. The last receiver (65 th ) has to be provided to the project before the end of 2012. Currently, half of the production cartridges have been delivered and accepted by the project. Every single cartridge has to go through thorough preliminary acceptance tests to make sure that they all meet the specifications imposed by the project. In order to achieve such a level of quality with high delivery rate, some product (PA) and quality (QA) assurance processes had to be put in place and fully automated test setups had to be implemented. We will briefly describe the cartridge, then the PA/QA processes and present the test setups together with the main performances of the production cartridges delivered so far. I. INTRODUCTION IRAM is responsible for the design and production of 73 (including spares) integrated front-end modules for Band 7 (275–373 GHz). When they were laid down in the early 2000's, the technical specifications of the project were pushing the envelope of the then-current state-of-art. The corresponding challenges were successfully overcome during the design phase and reported in several articles (see [1], [2] and [3] references at the end of this article). At present, well into the production phase, the emphasis has shifted to quality assurance and schedule. With its background in mm-wave radioastronomy and interferometry, IRAM was in a unique position to meet the technical requirements of the design phase. Performing the series production of 73-off state-of art modules, with tight performance and schedule constraints, was a new type of challenge for a medium size scientific institute, and required to set up an adequate workflow organization and test S. Mahieu 1* , D. Maier, A. Navarrini, G.Celestin, J.Chalain, D. Geoffroy, F.Laslaz, G. Perrin are with Institut de Radio Astronomie Millimetrique, IRAM*, Saint Martin d’Hères, contact: mahieu@iram.fr, phone +33(0)4 76 82 49 61 B. Lazareff is with Institut de Planéotologie et d’Astrophysique de Grenoble (IPAG). instrumentation. The present paper is a brief account of how this was achieved. II. BRIEF PRESENTATION OF THE BAND 7 CARTRIDGE The ALMA front end will consist of a 4-K cryostat with ten plug-in dual polarization receivers called cartridges, covering the frequency range 31 to 950 GHz. A block diagram of the Band 7 cartridge is given in Fig. 1. It includes a cold cartridge assembly (CCA), which was developed and is currently being produced at IRAM, and a warm cartridge assembly (WCA), which is provided to IRAM by the ALMA project for test purposes. An overall view of a production cold cartridge assembly is given in Fig. 2. Fig. 1: Band 7 cartridge block diagram. The cold cartridge assembly consists of three cold stages with operating temperatures of 4K, 15K and 80K and a room temperature baseplate which is the interface between the vacuum and the air. The stages are supported by G10 glass fiber tube spacers. The four plates and G10 tubes constitute the blank cartridge, designed and supplied within the ALMA project by Rutherford Appleton Laboratories (UK). • The 4 K assembly comprises: - The cold optics, consisting of three off-axis elliptical mirrors and a polarization diplexing grid, designed to achieve near-optimum coupling of the two cartridge feedhorns to the telescope within prescribed tolerances; - Two dual-sideband (2SB) Superconductor-Insulator- Superconductor (SIS) mixer assemblies, one per polarization, covering the RF band 275-373 GHz. Each 2SB assembly is cascaded with 2x4-8GHz IF low noise amplifiers that provide down converted signals from both upper (USB) and lower sidebands (LSB). These Status of ALMA Band 7 Cartridge Production S. Mahieu, D. Maier, B. Lazareff, A. Navarrini, G.Celestin, J.Chalain, D. Geoffroy, F.Laslaz, G. Perrin