Speaker
eric oberla
(uchicago)
Description
A data acquisition (DAQ) system using the 10 - 15 Gigasample/second (GSa/s) PSEC4 waveform recording
Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) has been developed as part of the
Large Area Picosecond Photo-Detector Collaboration (LAPPD).
The LAPPD collaboration is developing 20$\times$20 cm$^2$ glass-body micro-channel plate (MCP)
photomultiplier tubes equipped with an economical 1.5 GHz, 30-channel microstrip anode to extract
the MCP signals.
The PSEC4 chip, a 6-channel 0.13 $\mu$m CMOS waveform digitizer, was designed by the
Universities of Chicago and Hawai'i as a first generation readout ASIC for these photosensors [1].
A PSEC4-based DAQ system that is capable of reading out a number of
LAPPD MCPs was subsequently developed by our group.
The system architecture incorporates two levels of hardware, FPGA-embedded system control, and
data processing.
At the front-end is a 30 channel unit that holds five PSEC4 ASICs and a control
FPGA that plugs directly into one terminal of the LAPPD MCP anode. The analog bandwidth of the signal input is 1.5 GHz. In order to record waveforms at both ends of the LAPPD anode, two of these cards are required to fully instrument an LAPPD MCP. The back-end card
houses the system control FPGA, distributes the system clock,
and manages up to four front-end units by means of eight 800 Mbps LVDS
lines. This back-end card communicates to a PC using USB 2.0 or gigabit Ethernet.
The system performance and LAPPD detector-integrated testing results will be presented.
[1] NIM A732, p452, Jan 2014.
Primary author
eric oberla
(uchicago)
