The analog front-end for the Low Gain Avalanche Detector (LGAD) based precision timing application in the CMS Endcap Timing Layer (ETL) has been prototyped in a 65 nm CMOS mini-ASIC named ETROC0. Serving as the very first prototype of ETL readout chip (ETROC), ETROC0 aims to study and demonstrate the performance of the analog front-end, with the goal to achieve 40 to 50 ps time resolution per...
We present the design and test results of a Time-to-Digital-Converter (TDC) functional block. The TDC will be a part of the readout ASIC, called ETROC, of the Low-Gain Avalanche Detectors (LGADs) for the CMS Endcap Timing Layer (ETL) of High-Luminosity LHC upgrade. One of the challenges of the ETROC design is that the TDC is required to consume less than 200 mW for each pixel at the nominal...
Abstract: We present the design and test results of a data transmitting ASIC, GBS20, for particle physics experiments. The goal of GBS20 will be an ASIC that employs two serializers each from the 10.24 Gbps lpGBT SerDes, sharing the PLL also from lpGBT. A PAM4 encoder plus a VCSEL driver will be implemented in the same die to use the same clock system, eliminating the need of CDRs in the PAM4...
In many countries around the world, most of the waste use to be disposed of to landfills, this generate public concern about the health effects of emissions. Landfill gases are produced by the natural bacterial decomposition of waste and it is about half of methane, with the remainder mostly carbon dioxide and minor amounts of other gases. Real-time measurement and modelling of emissions gases...
In Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes like MACE, Synchronous digitization of 1088-input channels of Camera Electronics is of paramount importance. These PMT based pixels of Camera have been incorporated in 68 modules called Camera Integrated Module (CIM), each catering to 16 pixels. Each module acquires, processes and transfers data independently of other modules. To reduce the data...
The GOSIP (Gigabit Optical Serial Interface Protocol) provides communication via optical fibres between multiple kinds of front-end electronics and the KINPEX PCIe receiver board located in the readout host PC. In recent years a stack of device driver software has been developed to utilize this hardware for several scenarios of data acquisition. On top of this driver foundation, several...
The elliptical cavities are important component of superconducting part of ESS (European Spallation Source) linear accelerator. Each of 120 cavities have to deliver the electric field at the proper phase and amplitude to accelerate protons. LLRF (Low Level Radio Frequency) system is responsible for controlling these parameters and distributing reference clock signal. Another task is...
ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will undergo a major Phase-II upgrade for the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC). The upgrade affects all major ATLAS systems, including the Trigger and Data Acquisition systems.
As part of the Level-0 Trigger System, the Global Trigger uses full-granularity calorimeter cells to perform algorithms, refines the trigger objects and applies topological...
Real-time computing refers to applications that compute correct results but, and more importantly, applications that perform on-time. In addition to usual system constraints, real-time systems include timing constraints that need to be satisfied by the system in order to provide a safe computation. Designing such systems requires more attention and strict guarantees to ensure their safety. One...
New Mössbauer spectrometer based on CompactRIO platform was developed. CompactRIO is a modular industrial computer platform developed by National Instruments. This device runs “LabVIEW RT OS” - Linux-based Real-Time Operating system, which has support of LabVIEW programming environment. CompactRIO has integrated FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array), which was used for most critical functions...
Brachytherapy is a radiotherapy modality where the radioactive material is placed close to the
tumor, being a common treatment for skin, breast and prostate cancers. In order to provide
the best treatment possible and minimize risks for patients, dose verification and quality
assurance in radiotherapy needs to be assessed in real-time and with as much precision as
possible....
The DUNE detector is a long baseline neutrino experiment due to take data in 2025. The data acquisition (DAQ) system of the DUNE experiment will consist of a highly complex and distributed architecture designed to handle O(5) TB/s of incoming data from the readout system at a rate of 2 MHz.
One of the physics goals of the DUNE experiment is to detect neutrino signals from Supernova Burst...
We have assembled a small-scale streaming data acquisition system based on the SAMPA front-end ASIC. The 32-channel SAMPA chip was designed for the high-luminosity upgrade of the ALICE Time Projection Chamber (TPC) detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The goals of the prototype system are to determine if the SAMPA chip is appropriate for use in detector systems at Jefferson Lab, and...
We present a free and open source firmware designed to operate as an Intelligent Platform Management Controller (IPMC). An IPMC is a fundamental component for electronic boards conformant to the Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA) standard, being adopted by a number of high energy physics experiments, and is responsible for monitoring the health parameters of the board,...
The Jianmeng Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) will be the
largest, liquid scintillator (LS) underground neutrino
experiment. Juno is under construction in the South of China and its
main purpose is to measure the neutrino mass hierarchy. Thanks to its
large mass, 20 kton of LS, it will perform several measurements, from the precise measurements of oscillation parameters
to the...
Modern FPGA and system-on-chip (SoC) require extensive amounts of electronics and complex multi-layer printed circuit boards (PCB) to support their operating conditions. By combining all required electronics on a densely packed PCB, the use of SoC-based system-on-module (SoM) helps to reduce system costs by reusing multiple SoMs in the same DAQ system or in different applications....
The VXS_Trigger_Processor [VTP] was developed and commissioned for CLAS12 in the fall of 2016. This board is a VITA41 switch card and it collects data from a variety of front-end TDC and Flash ADC modules. The VTP has since been used in several experiments at Jefferson Lab serving as the L1 trigger module for a variety of detector types, such as stacked calorimeters, strip calorimeters,...
The capability to extract timing informations out of a serial data stream has become a very common requirement. The receiver usually relies on a Clock and Data Recovery (CDR) chip, which generates a clock signal at the corresponding sampling frequency, phase-aligned to the data.
Modern physics experiment have often this same requirement, where perhaps thousands of boards receive uncorrelated...
Automatic test system of the back-end card for the JUNO experiment
S. Hang1, 2, Y. Yang1, B. Clerbaux1 and P.-A. Petitjean1
1. IIHE(ULB), Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium
2. Department of Nuclear Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China
The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is a medium-baseline neutrino...
J-PARC E16 experiment aims to investigate the origin of hadron mass through the systematic measurement of the spectral change of vector mesons in nuclei. The experiment is performed at the high-moemntum beam line, which is a newly constructed beam line, at J-PARC Hadron Experimental Facility with a new spectrometer. A 30 GeV proton beam with an intensity of $1\times10^{10}$ protons per pulse...
The SuperKEKB accelerator in Tsukuba, Japan is providing e$^+$e$^-$ beams for the Belle-II experiment since about one year. In order to deal with the aimed peak luminosity being forty times higher than the one recorded at Belle, a pixel detector based on DEPFET technology has been installed It features a long integration time of 20us resulting in an expected data rate of 20 GB/s at a maximum...
Several types of superconducting devices require quench detection systems to safely operate. Detection has to happen in real time to avoid damage. Superconducting magnets for particle accelerators are one example of such device. The quench, that is the resistive runaway resulting from the transition from superconductive to the normal-conducting state must be detect as soon as possible to avoid...
Synchrotron scanning techniques, particularly in experimental continuous scans, require a high level of synchronization between data acquisition- and motion systems - (optics or sample). The purpose of the PandABox system [1] is to address multi--technique scanning- and feedback- applications. The initial objective driving the project was to provide a real-time, multi-channel, encoder...
Recent advances in acquisition equipment is providing experiments with growing amounts of precise yet affordable sensors. At the same time an improved computational power, coming from new hardware resources (GPU, FPGA, TPU), has been made available at relatively low costs. This led us to explore the possibility of completely renewing the chain of acquisition for a fusion experiment, where many...
Improving image processing systems is key to plasma diagnostics. The operation conditions of ITER and the future machines require changing the role of such systems from monitoring and archiving for offline post-processing to real-time processing for machine control. Another purpose for these systems is machine protection. A relevant application of vision diagnostics is the wall and divertor...
The ITER Neutral Beam Test Facility (NBTF) is an extensive R&D programme currently under advanced construction at Consorzio RFX, Padova (Italy), with the aim of developing and testing the technology required by the ITER neutral beam injectors. The NBTF uses a two-step approach that involves the implementation of two experimental devices: the first, SPIDER, for the study of the ion source and...
Particle therapy uses proton or 12-C beams for the treatment of deep-seated solid tumors. Due to the features of energy deposition of charged particles, a small amount of dose is released to the healthy tissue in the beam entrance region, while the maximum of the dose is released to the tumor at the end of the beam range, in the Bragg peak region. Dose deposition is dominated by...
The Ultra-High-Resolution (UHR) positron emission tomography (PET) scanner is the latest LabPET II-based device being designed at Université de Sherbrooke for imaging the human brain. This new scanner uses the already established LabPET II technology capable of sub-millimetric spatial resolution in preclinical imaging. The UHR architecture implements 129,024 detection channels. The purpose of...
As radiation detector arrays in nuclear physics applications become larger and physically more separated, the time synchronization and trigger distribution between many channels of detector readout electronics becomes more challenging. Clocks and triggers are traditionally distributed through dedicated cabling, but newer methods such as the IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol and White Rabbit...
The High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) will have a peak luminosity of $5-10 \times 10 ^{34}$ $cm^{-2}$ $s^{-1}$, five to ten times higher than the design luminosity of the LHC. The ATLAS Tile Calorimeter (TileCal) is a sampling calorimeter with steel as absorber and plastic scintillators as active medium. Major replacements of TileCal's electronics will take place during the...
The Phase-2 ATLAS upgrade for the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) has motivated progressive redesigns of the ATLAS Tile Calorimeter (TileCal) read-out link and control board (Daughterboard). The Daughterboard (DB) communicates with the off-detector electronics via two 4.6 Gbps downlinks and two pairs of 9.6 Gbps uplinks. Configuration commands and LHC timing is received through...
Digital cameras are commonly used for diagnostic purposes in large-scale physics experiments.
A typical image diagnostic system consists of an optical setup, digital camera, frame grabber, image processing CPU, and data analysis tool.
The standard architecture of the imaging system has a number of disadvantages. Data transmitted from a camera are buffered multiple times and must be converted...
Over the last decade advances in electronics, computing, and software have changed the assumptions upon which data acquisition system designs for nuclear physics experiments are based. This is true at Jefferson Lab as well as at other laboratories. Looking forward to future experiments that are in various stages of planning we must reevaluate the near- and long-term course that the development...
The Fast Tracker Processor (FTK) is an ATLAS trigger upgrade built for full event,
low-latency, high-rate tracking. The FTK core, made of 9U VME boards, performs the most
demanding computational task. The "Associative Memory Board Serial Link Processor"
(AMBSLP) and the "Auxiliary card" (AUX), plugged on the front and back sides of the same VME slot, constitute the Processing Unit (PU),...
We are building a high-resolution brain PET scanner, the Scanner Approaching in Vivo Autoradiographic Neuro Tomography (SAVANT). Based on the LabPET-II’s detector module with 1:1 crystal to APD coupling, it is expected to reach 1.35 mm³ volumetric resolution. At this resolution level, slight, involuntary head movement will blur the image and spoil the exquisite intrinsic performance of the...
The purpose of attenuators system on a synchrotron beamline is to adapt intensity of the incident beam accordingly to the experimental conditions, samples and used detectors. The SixS (Surfaces and interfaces x-ray Scattering) beamline is equipped with a unique fast attenuation system prototype developed at SOLEIL Synchrotron. It adjusts in a real time the beam intensity in function of the...
