Speaker
Description
Timepix3 is a high speed hybrid pixel detector consisting of a 256x256 pixel matrix with a maximum data rate of up to 5.12 Gbps (80 MHit/s). The ASIC is equipped with eight data channels that are data driven and zero suppressed which makes it suitable for particle tracking and spectral imaging.
In this paper, we present a programmable USB 3.0-based readout system with online pre-processing capabilities. USB 3.0 is present on all modern computers and can, under real-world conditions, achieve up to 370 MB/s, which allows up to 40 MHit/s of raw pixel data. With on-line processing, the proposed readout system is capable of achieving higher transfer rate (approaching Medipix4) and thus hit rate since only information rather than raw data can be transmitted.
The system is based on an Opal Kelly development board with a Spartan 6 FPGA providing a USB 3.0 interface between FPGA and PC. It connects to a standard CERN Timepix3 chipboard with a VHDCI connector via a custom designed adapter card. The firmware is structured into blocks such as detector interface, USB interface, system control, and an interface for data pre-processing. On the PC side, a Qt/C++ multi platform software library is implemented to control the readout system, providing access to detector functions and handling high speed USB 3.0 streaming of data from the detector.
We demonstrate equalisation, calibration and data acquisition using a Cadmium Telluride sensor and optimise imaging data using simultaneous ToT (Time-over-Threshold) and ToA (Time-of-Arrival) information.
