The Use of USB 3.0 for Fast Data Transfer in a Plant PET Detector

Abstract

The Research Centre Juelich is developing a PET detector for plant phenotyping together with Philips Digital PhotonCounting, Aachen. The scientific goal is to study the carbon transport in plants. The poster will give an overview overthe whole project, but will focus on the use of USB 3.0 to transfer data from the FPGA to the acquisition computer. Todetect the photon pairs we use a ring of digital photon counters recently developed by Philips.For the prototype we decided to use a Xilinx Kintex evaluation board for data concentration and processing of thecoincidences. It is assumed that the necessary data rate from the FPGA to the acquisition computer is about 300MByte/s. As data link a 10-gigabit Ethernet link would be preferred, but the evaluation board contains a USB 3.0interface already, therefore we chose to use this one in order to reduce the development costs. The poster will discussthe pros and cons of the use of USB for data acquisition and the results achieved so far