Münster 2017 – scientific programme

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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 27: Poster

HK 27.75: Poster

Tuesday, March 28, 2017, 16:45–18:45, F Foyer

The ARAGORN Front-End - FPGA Based Time-to-Digital Converter with Superior Optical Readout Capabilities — •Maximilian Büchele, Horst Fischer, Florian Herrmann, and Carl Schaffer — Physikalisches Institut, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, 79104 Freiburg, Germany

The ARAGORN front-end offers high-performance readout capabilities for state-of-the-art high-energy physics experiments. The design constraints aim to develop a cost-effective, fully configurable Time-to-Digital Converter (TDC) platform with considerable channel density at smallest form factor possible, allowing for precise time-of-flight or drift-time measurements. The front-end module employs 4+1 Xilinx Artix-7 FPGAs, four of which implement the TDC feature processing a total of 384 channels with an average time resolution of 165 ps. The acquired data is passed on to the fifth on-board FPGA acting as data hub and generic master for auxiliary board components. The board has been designed to set up a multi-tiered optical readout network. Therefore, a SFP transceiver socket for data output and a CXP compliant receptacle reside on the ARAGORN front-end to optionally enable fiber-optic communication with up to seven boards through a star topology. The hot-pluggable CXP module connects to the satellite boards through an optical breakout cable. This novel approach permits to read out in total eight boards yielding 3072 input channels via a single optical fiber at a bandwidth of 6.6 Gb/s. This work is supported by BMBF.