Evaluation of Fermi Read - out ofthe

Prototypes of the Fermi system have been used to read out a prototype of the Atlas hadron calorimeter in a beam test at the CERN SPS. The Fermi read-out system, using a compressor and a sampling ADC, is compared to a standard charge integrating read-out by measuring the energy resolution of the calorimeter separately with the two systems on the same events. Signal processing techniques have been designed to optimize the treatment of Fermi data. The resulting energy resolution is better than the one obtained with the standard read-out.