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A new digital beam position monitor (DBPM) system has been developed and successfully tested at the PSI proton accelerators. The DBPM hardware consists of an analogue RF front-end (RFFE), a VMEbus backplane module (VBM), and the PSI VME PMC Carrier board (VPC). The RFFE combines the 2nd RF harmonic (101.26 MHz) beam signals of pickup coils with a 101.31 MHz pilot signal. The RFFE output signals are undersampled and down-converted to base-band (no analogue mixer) by ADCs and DDCs (Direct Digital Downconverters) on the VBM. The DDCs send the digitised beam and pilot signal amplitudes to a Virtex2Pro FPGA on the VPC board. The FPGA calculates the beam positions at different averaging rates, checks interlock limits, and provides triggered storage of beam position waveforms. Furthermore, the FPGA performs automatic gain control of voltage-controlled amplifiers (VCAs) of RFFE and VBM. By continuous normalisation of beam to pilot signal, nonlinearities and temperature drifts of the electronics are eliminated. Compared to the old analogue BPM electronics, the new DBPMs offer an increased dynamic range (0.2 μA to 2 mA instead of 5 μA to 2 mA) and larger bandwidth (10 kHz instead of 10 Hz).
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