Global Event-identifier Module: a distributed digital approach to event-of-interest identification logic for physics...

Area of Science:

• High-energy physics
• Nuclear instrumentation
• Data acquisition systems

Background:

• Current data acquisition systems face challenges in handling high throughput and large numbers of detectors.
• Efficiently identifying and preprocessing events of interest in real-time is a significant experimental hurdle.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a flexible and fast event identification module for data acquisition systems.
• To address the experimental challenge of precise event selection with minimal time delay.

Main Methods:

• Development of a Global Event-identifier Module (GEM) on the CAMAC platform.
• Implementation using a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) for flexibility.
• Utilizing a distributed architecture with inter-module communication via Ethernet (CAT5).

Main Results:

• The GEM module validates events of interest within 32 ns (excluding cable delay).
• Achieved higher throughput through selective reading of events.
• Enabled synchronized data collection from multiple CAMAC crates in a distributed environment.
• Supported unified, distributed, and multi-strobe data acquisition modes.

Conclusions:

• The GEM module offers a flexible, high-throughput solution for modern data acquisition challenges.
• FPGA implementation allows for easy algorithm updates and hardware adaptability.
• The system provides timestamped data for each identified event, crucial for experimental analysis.