Compact, battery powered, wireless digitizers for in situ data acquisitions in the sino-united spherical tokamak

Potential isolation and long cable drive are very important in acquiring certain signals from tokamak diagnostics. Compact, battery powered, wireless digitizers for in situ data acquisition have been developed and routinely used in the sino-united spherical tokamak to solve the problems of isolation and long cables. The wireless digitizers utilize the integrated analog to digital converters and the static random access memory of microcontrollers but transfer data wirelessly. They consist of simple and concise circuits but have considerable performances of 12-16 bit in resolution and 500-1000 kS/s in sample rate. Wireless triggering and energy saving are two major challenges of the wireless digitizers. Wireless transceivers in the data link layer are used as trigger and can reduce the trigger jitters to be smaller than 1 μs. In order to reduce the energy consumption, the wireless digitizers are waken only when the tokamak is about to discharge. After discharges, they turn to a periodic checking mode with current consumption smaller than 200 μA. Because of low duty cycle, the wireless digitizers have a battery life of up to four weeks. In general, the wireless digitizers have better performance than normal isolation amplifiers and can greatly simplify the cable connections. They are very suitable for the data acquisition of dangerous and/or susceptible analog signals in tokamaks.