Speaker
Description
The SPADI Alliance in Japan is developing a common, trigger-less streaming data acquisition (DAQ) platform to address the increasing demands of modern nuclear and particle physics experiments. The Alliance integrates R&D efforts from front-end electronics to computing and networking, promoting open collaboration across laboratories.
At the hardware level, the platform is developing a family of streaming front-end electronics. Its first implementation, the FPGA-based time-to-digital converter (TDC) module, AMANEQ, achieves sub–30 ps timing resolution and continuous readout. Additional front-end modules, such as waveform digitizers currently under development, extend applicability to diverse detector systems. A lightweight and deterministic clock synchronization scheme, MIKUMARI, together with the LACCP protocol, enables precise clock frequency and timestamp alignment without reliance on accelerator timing signals, allowing plug-and-play operation and flexible system scaling.
On the software side, the platform employs NestDAQ, a modular streaming DAQ framework that supports distributed data transport, semi-automatic topology configuration, load balancing, and software-based triggering. Ongoing developments also focus on observability for system monitoring, error analysis and anomaly detection. For the online processing and monitoring, Artemis, a root-based analysis framework, is employed.
The SPADI standard system has been deployed at multiple facilities including RCNP, J-PARC, RARiS, and HIMAC, demonstrating online coincidence identification and event reconstruction in practical beam experiments. This contribution describes the concept and architecture of the organization and the system, recent progress in hardware and software development, and initial experimental implementations.