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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 20: Instrumentierung IV

HK 20.5: Talk

Tuesday, March 22, 2011, 15:15–15:30, HS1

A Common Read-Out Receiver Card for ALICE DAQ and HLT — •Heiko Engel and Udo Kebschull — Kirchhoff-Institut für Physik, Universität Heidelberg

In the ALICE read-out chain, both Data Acquisition (DAQ) and High Level Trigger (HLT) use FPGA-based Read-Out Receiver Cards (RORC) as interface between the optical Detector Data Link (DDL) and the DAQ and HLT cluster machines. The DAQ-RORC and the HLT-RORC have been developed as independent projects with quite similar requirements and are now facing the same problem: Both cards use a PCI-X interface to the host machines, which is not available anymore in current and future PCs. Therefore, a new common RORC for DAQ and HLT is developed. This new RORC will have a fast PCIe interface, high density parallel optical DDL connections and will combine several of the old cards into one new device. The new RORC will be backward compatible to the current protocols and transmission rates and can be integrated seamlessly into the current setup while providing room for DDL speed upgrades and further FPGA-based data pre-processing.