Bochum 2009 – scientific programme

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HK: Fachverband Hadronen und Kerne

HK 67: Poster Session

HK 67.98: Poster

Thursday, March 19, 2009, 14:00–16:00, Audi-Max

Development of a versatile digital readout system — •Marius C. Mertens, James Ritman, and Tobias Stockmanns — Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Institut für Kernphysik, Jülich

During the research and design phase of new detector electronics, development of a suitable test environment takes a significant amount of time. Most existing systems are specifically designed for certain frontend electronics and cannot be reused for future developments. Thus, our approach is to build a flexible test environment with state-of-the-art hardware, which can be reconfigured to support various frontend electronics. This is achieved by deploying a modular design concept, which is followed in both hardware and software. Key features of the hardware platform are the gigabit optical connection to the PC, the powerful FPGA (Virtex 4), and consequent separation of analog and digital parts of the readout. Via firmware updates, arbitrary communication protocols can be implemented and the external connectors of the readout board can be freely configured. This is accompanied by a modular software framework written in C++ which declares different communication layers for easy hardware access as well as a generic storage structure for simple data handling. These levels of abstraction make it easy to add support for changed or completely new devices. The implementation of the digital readout system as well as its modular firmware and software design will be presented and its key features will be explained in detail. Supported in part by the EU and FZ-Jülich.