The CALICE collaboration is studying the design of high performance electromagnetic and hadronic calorimeters for future International Linear Collider detectors. For the electromagnetic calorimeter, the current baseline choice is a high granularity sampling calorimeter with tungsten as absorber and silicon detectors as sensitive material. A ``physics prototype'' has been constructed, consisting of thirty sensitive layers. Each layer has an active area of 18 × 18 cm2 and a pad size of 1 × 1 cm2. The absorber thickness totals 24 radiation lengths. It has been exposed in 2006 and 2007 to electron and hadron beams at the DESY and CERN beam test facilities, using a wide range of beam energies and incidence angles. In this paper, the prototype and the data acquisition chain are described and a summary of the data taken in the 2006 beam tests is presented. The methods used to subtract the pedestals and calibrate the detector are detailed. The signal-over-noise ratio has been measured at 7.63±0.01. Some electronics features have been observed; these lead to coherent noise and crosstalk between pads, and also crosstalk between sensitive and passive areas. The performance achieved in terms of uniformity and stability is presented.