1. The back-end electronics of the time projection chambers in the T2K experiment
- Author
-
A. Vallereau, D. Calvet, I. Mandjavidze, C. Ohlmann, K. Mizouchi, O. Le Dortz, C. Gutjahr, F. Sanchez, B. Andrieu, and D. Terront
- Subjects
Nuclear and High Energy Physics ,Engineering ,business.industry ,Firmware ,PowerPC ,Electrical engineering ,computer.software_genre ,Synchronization ,Data acquisition ,Software ,Nuclear Energy and Engineering ,Nuclear electronics ,Electronics ,Electrical and Electronic Engineering ,business ,Field-programmable gate array ,computer ,Computer hardware - Abstract
Among other detectors, the T2K neutrino experiment comprises three large time projection chambers segmented into over 124.000 electronics channels. The back-end electronics system is designed to distribute a reference clock to the front-end electronics, aggregate event data over seventy-two 2 Gbit/s optical links and format events that are sent via a standard PC to the global data acquisition system of the experiment. The core of this system is a set of 18 Data Concentrator Cards based on an inexpensive commercial Field Programmable Gate Array evaluation kit with specific add-ons. We describe the adaptations that were made to the original platform, and detail the design of the firmware and software running on the embedded PowerPC processor of the FPGA of a Data Concentrator Card. We show how the intrinsic parallelism and a mixed firmware and software implementation of the data reduction and acquisition tasks lead to a flexible system capable of extracting in real time meaningful information from the 2.5 GByte/s of raw event data produced by the front-end electronics at a nominal rate of 20 Hz.
- Published
- 2010