Köln 2004 – scientific programme

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HK: Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 18: Instrumentation and Applications II

HK 18.7: Talk

Tuesday, March 9, 2004, 17:00–17:15, C

DCS embedded Linux front-end board — •Heinz Tilsner — Kirchhoff-Institut für Physik, Universität Heidelberg

Control and monitoring of complex detectors like the one used in ALICE requires sophisticated control systems in order to supervise the overall working conditions of these detectors like voltages, temperatures, or gas pressures. In addition, these systems are usually used for the initialisation and configuration of the front-end electronic which include e.g. downloading pedestal values. They comprises of hardware and software components acting closely together. One important requirement of these systems are their capability to react autonomously to critical situations in order to avoid damages to the detector. The presented autonomous DCS single board computer represents the front-end part of the detector control system of the TRD, TPC, and PHOS detectors of ALICE. The device is equipped with Alteras’ Excalibur FPGA, comprising both a 100 k gate FPGA and an embedded ARM processor on which Linux as operating system is running. The FPGA allows to customise the device for different front-end environments on the different detectors. Communication with the board is based on Ethernet replacing the canonical fieldbus which is modified in order to operate in magnetic fields. Since the board has to operate in an environment with high radiation exposure special care has been taken during the design process in order to ensure radiation- and fault-tolerance. We present the architecture of the device and results of performance measurements of the first production prototypes.