Heidelberg 2015 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 41: Instrumentation 13

HK 41.6: Vortrag

Mittwoch, 25. März 2015, 16:00–16:15, M/HS1

Upgrade of the Data Acquisition System for the A2 Experiment at MAMI — •Andreas Neiser and Wolfgang Gradl — Institut für Kernphysik, Johann-Joachim-Becher-Weg 45, Mainz

The A2 collaboration at the electron accelerator MAMI in Mainz uses energy-tagged photons to produce light mesons off the nucleon. Its current data acquisition system is the major performance bottleneck under typical trigger conditions. Furthermore, the availability of spare parts is limited, which renders the maintainability for the next decade difficult. Thus, an upgraded system is desirable for A2 to achieve the upcoming experimental goals. For this upgrade, an FPGA-based solution using the TRB3 is being considered.

The TRB3 is a multi-purpose 4+1 FPGA board, where four peripheral FPGAs communicate with one add-on board each. The central FPGA provides data readout via standard gigabit Ethernet and interconnection to other TRB3s via optical links. The TRB3 collaboration currently provides flexible TDC-in-FPGA firmwares with various discrimination front-ends as well as a 48 channel ADC add-on board with 60 MHz sampling rate and 10 bit resolution. Additionally, an extensive software framework for slow control and readout is available.

We present energy and timing measurements with the ADC add-on board at the Crystal Ball NaI(Tl) calorimeter and compare the performance to the currently used COMPASS data acquisition system. Furthermore, we give an outlook on possible feature extraction firmwares and estimate the costs for a complete upgrade of the system.