Speaker
Mr
Ricardo Herrero
(Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)
Description
Analog data acquisition systems used in diagnostic and control of large physics experiments require high sampling rates and real time processing functionalities. FPGA devices allow efficient implementation of this kind of solutions. Nowadays, large scientific facilities are using middleware platforms to simplify system integration. EPICS is one of the most extended solutions. Moreover, heterogeneous hardware integration in these systems is a very complex task and different approaches trying to standardize this are under development and use. One of these solutions is AreaDetector for EPICS. AreaDetector is an open source module for EPICS which is mostly used for image acquisition applications. It simplifies the integration of heterogeneous image acquisition hardware providing different imaging formats, different hardware form-factors, using different communication protocols, and providing a common software interface to EPICS. This is a layers-based architecture which minimizes the amount of code necessary to add support for new hardware (detector). Each detector only needs to implement some standard parameters and functions, a standard set of records for every device that can be used by all EPICS clients. AreaDetector has also been used in some analog signal acquisition systems (quadEM driver supports quad electrometers/pico-ammeters, typically used for photodiode-based x-ray beam position monitors, or split ion chambers) but there are no implementations based on FPGA such as FlexRIO technology. This paper presents the integration of an acquisition and processing solution in a PXIe platform using FlexRIO technology by means of a model that solves the acquisition and signal processing in a FPGA and a software layer in C++ implemented with IRIO library (open source solution for RIO devices in Linux environment). A summary of the performance of different examples is included.
Author
Mr
Ricardo Herrero
(Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)
Co-authors
Dr
Antonio Carpeño
(Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)
Dr
Mariano Ruiz
(Technical University of Madrid)
Mr
Sergio Esquembri Martínez
(Universidad Politecnica de Madrid)