Speaker
Description
The development of the data acquisition system (DAQ) is one of the key technological contributions of I3M within the PeTVISION project, a collaborative international effort involving FBK, ICCUB, IJS, ONCOVISION, Yale University, and MRI-TUM Klinikum rechts der Isar. Within this framework, I3M, with support from ONCOVISION, is responsible for the FPGA-based nuclear DAQ, including the design of scalable concentrator boards (PETV_CB) and the DAQ architecture required to support a highly modular PET system, while also contributing to the development of the system’s synchronization and coincidence detection board (PETV_TRG), led by ONCOVISION. The overall architecture is intended to scale from validated elementary building blocks up to the complete system.
The proposed DAQ is based on Xilinx Artix-7 FPGAs and is designed to support a PET system with more than 18,000 readout channels. In the initial implementation, the front-end readout is based on the FastIC+ ASIC, an 8-channel chip with integrated TDC that provides digitized timing information and transmits nuclear data through a simplified Aurora 64B/66B single-lane link operating from 80 Mb/s up to 1.28 Gb/s. The DAQ architecture foresees one PETV_CB concentrator board handling 4 photodetector modules, each of them connected through 16 Aurora links for ASIC data readout. In addition, the board provides 4 I2C buses for ASIC control and up to 16 extra I2C devices for sensing and automated supervision of the readout system.
The work presented here focuses on the preliminary design and validation of the fundamental DAQ building blocks. Although full validation will only be achieved once the complete scalable architecture is assembled, the results obtained so far already demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach. First, we validated the read and write access to FastIC+ internal registers through I2C, confirming correct low-level control of the ASIC. Second, we validated the reception of nuclear data transmitted from a FastIC+ ASIC to an Artix-7 FPGA prototype through Aurora 64B/66B, which represents a major milestone toward multichannel acquisition. The analysis of the received FastIC+ stream also confirmed the relevance of event packets, delimiter blocks, idle blocks, and monitoring-related packet structures required for robust receiver development.
A further important preliminary result is the demonstration of high-throughput data transfer between the FPGA prototype and a host computer, reaching sustained readout rates on the order of 1 GB/s. Taken together, these results show that the combination of ASIC control through I2C, Aurora-based nuclear data reception, and high-speed data extraction can be coherently integrated into a single FPGA-based DAQ platform. While still preliminary, this work establishes the validated basic blocks on which the future multiboard, multichannel, and full-scale PeTVISION DAQ system will be built.
| Track | FTMI |
|---|---|
| Presentation type | Poster |