Speaker
Description
The continuous increase in sampling rates of modern waveform digitizers, reaching and exceeding the multi-GSPS regime, poses significant challenges to real-time FPGA-based signal processing. New Platforms fast digitizers enable unprecedented bandwidth and timing resolution but require processing architectures capable of sustaining deterministic operation at effective data rates of several giga-samples per second.
To address these challenges, Sci-Compiler has been extended with native support for time-multiplexed (TM) processing architectures, allowing ultra-fast serial data streams to be transformed into parallel, phase-interleaved buses operating at lower clock frequencies. In this approach, a single high-rate ADC stream is decomposed into multiple synchronous lanes, enabling complex real-time algorithms to be executed within the timing and resource constraints of modern FPGAs. This paradigm requires a complete redesign of classical nuclear signal-processing blocks, including baseline restorers, trapezoidal and pole-zero digital shapers, constant fraction discriminators, peak detectors, and trigger logic, to preserve numerical accuracy and temporal determinism across interleaved samples.
Sci-Compiler abstracts the complexity of TM architectures through its graphical design environment and modular IP library, allowing users to deploy advanced real-time processing on digitizers operating from 500 MSPS up to 5 GSPS without direct FPGA coding. The framework automatically manages lane alignment, pipeline balancing, and inter-phase data dependencies, enabling scalable and portable designs across heterogeneous hardware platforms. This contribution presents the architectural principles of Sci-Compiler’s TM engine, describes the implementation of key signal-processing IPs, and demonstrates their application to high-rate nuclear spectroscopy and fast-timing measurements, highlighting how time-multiplexed FPGA processing enables next-generation real-time DAQ systems.
| Minioral | Yes |
|---|---|
| IEEE Member | No |
| Are you a student? | No |