The Construction of the CMS Silicon Strip Tracker

The CMS Silicon Strip tracker is a very large scale tracker entirely based on silicon strip detectors technology. The integration of modules, electronics, mechanics and services has been completed within the last eighteen months; first large standalone sub-structures (shells, disks, rods, petals depending on the tracker subdetector) have been integrated and verified; then they have been brought together into the final configuration. The CMS silicon tracker design and its construction is reviewed with particular emphasis on the procedures and quality checks deployed to successfully assembly several silicon strip modules and all ancillary components into these large sub-structures. An overview of the results and the lesson learned from the tracker integration are given, also in terms of failure and damage rates.