Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom
CCFE, Abingdon, Oxon, United Kingdom
York University, Heslington, York, United Kingdom
On MAST (the Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak) at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy some key control systems and diagnostics are being developed and upgraded with FPGA hardware. FPGAs provide many benefits including low latency and real-time digital signal processing. FPGAs blur the line between hardware and software. They are programmed (in VHDL/Verilog language) using software, but once configured act deterministically as hardware. The challenges in developing a system are keeping up-front and maintenance costs low, and prolonging the life of the device as much as possible. We accomplish lower costs by using industry standards such as the FMC (FPGA Mezzanine Card) Vita 57 standard and by using COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) components which are significantly less costly than developing them in-house. We extend the device operational lifetime by using a flexible FPGA architecture and industry standard interfaces. We discuss the implementation of FPGA control on two specific systems on MAST. The Vertical Stabilisation system comprises of a 1U form factor box with 1 SP601 Spartan6 FPGA board, 10/100 Ethernet access, Microblaze processor, 24-bit σ delta ADS1672 ADC and ATX power supply for remote power cycling. The Electron Bernstein Wave system comprises of a 4U form factor box with 2 ML605 Virtex6 FPGA boards, Gigabit Ethernet, Microblaze processor and 2 FMC108 ADC providing 16 Channels with 14-bit at 250MHz. AXI4 is used as the on chip bus between firmware components to allow very high data rates which has been tested at over 40Gbps streaming into a 2GB DDR3 SODIMM.
LBNL, Berkeley, California, USA
JLAB, Newport News, Virginia, USA
New instrumentation modules have been designed by Jefferson Lab and to take advantage of the higher performance and elegant backplane connectivity of the VITA 41 VXS standard. These new modules are required to meet the 200KHz trigger rates envisioned for the 12GeV experimental program. Upgrading legacy VME designs to the high speed gigabit serial extensions that VXS offers, comes with significant challenges, including electronic engineering design, plus firmware and software development issues. This paper will detail our system design approach including the critical system requirement stages, and explain the pipeline design techniques and selection criteria for the FPGA that require embedded Gigabit serial transceivers. The entire trigger system is synchronous and operates at 250MHz clock with synchronization signals, and the global trigger signals distributed to each front end readout crate via the second switch slot in the 21 slot, dual star VXS backplane. The readout of the buffered detector signals relies on 2eSST over the standard VME64x path at >200MB/s. We have achieved 20Gb/s transfer rate of trigger information within one VXS crate and will present results using production modules in a two crate test configuration with both VXS crates fully populated. The VXS trigger modules that reside in the front end crates, will be ready for production orders by the end of the 2011 fiscal year. VXS Global trigger modules are in the design stage now, and will be complete to meet the installation schedule for the 12GeV Physics program.
CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
SLAC, Menlo Park, California, USA
A unique effort is underway between industry and the international physics community to extend the Telecom industry’s Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA and MicroTCA) to meet future needs of the physics machine and detector community. New standard extensions for physics have now been designed to deliver unprecedented performance and high subsystem availability for accelerator controls, instrumentation and data acquisition. Key technical features include a unique out-of-band imbedded standard Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) system to manage hot-swap module replacement and hardware-software failover. However the acceptance of any new standard depends critically on the creation of strong collaborations among users and between user and industry communities. For the relatively small high performance physics market to attract strong industry support requires collaborations to converge on core infrastructure components including hardware, timing, software and firmware architectures; as well as to strive for a much higher degree of interoperability of both lab and industry designed hardware-software products than past generations of standards. The xTCA platform presents a unique opportunity for future progress. This presentation will describe status of the hardware-software extension plans; technology advantages for machine controls and data acquisition systems; and examples of current collaborative efforts to help develop an industry base of generic ATCA and MicroTCA products in an open-source environment.
1. PICMG, the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturer’s Group
2. Lab representation on PICMG includes CERN, DESY, FNAL, IHEP, IPFN, ITER and SLAC