Durante, M.

La Tessa, C.

Piersanti, L.

Schuy, C.

GSI Repository

Development of a VME data acquisition systemL. Piersanti1,2, C. Schuy3, C. La Tessa3, and M. Durante3,41University of Rome “Sapienza”, Italy; 2INFN Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati, Italy; 3GSI, Darmstadt, Germany;4TU Darmstadt, GermanyThe increasing interest in nuclear fragmentation mea-surements, both for ion therapy and space radiation protec-tion applications, demands a large amount of data takingsoften performed in various facilities around the world. Inorder to minimize the discrepancies between different dataacquisition systems (DAQ), e.g. charge and time resolu-tion, maximum acquisition rate, dead time efﬁciency andso on, a portable DAQ system, based on standard VMEbus and developed at “Scienze di Base e Applicate perl’Ingegneria” (SBAI) Department of “Sapienza” Universityof Rome, has been successfully installed and operated. Incontrast to the Multi Branch System (MBS) [1] currentlyused at GSI, this system is more suitable for small-scale ex-periments, i.e. where few detectors are involved and hencefew channels need to be read out. The software can runon any Linux platform, hence maximizing its portability,and currently supports two different boards that can be al-ternatively used as crate controller: a 2.0 USB link bridge(CAEN V1718) and an optical link bridge (CAEN V2718).The former allows to use as DAQ PC even a laptop (witha maximum acquisition rate, limited by USB data transferrate), while the latter requires only one standard PCI slotfor the optical link card (with a maximum acquisition rateof ∼20 kHz). This new system has been successfully usedduring GSI fall beam-time [2], [3] showing promising re-sults.DAQ setupIn the last decades, the VME bus has proved to be a re-liable and versatile tool for data acquisition systems in ex-perimental physics. Moreover, the availability of bridgeboards, that allow a simple and quite fast VME bus read-out, has increased the interest in this standard. For this rea-son, a portable DAQ system relying on VME bus has beeninstalled and successfully operated at GSI. This system,formerly developed by A. Sarti and V. Patera at “Scienzedi Base e Applicate per l’Ingegneria” (SBAI) Departmentof “Sapienza” University of Rome, has been built in orderto guarantee a high modularity (including or excluding aboard is, in fact, a straightforward process). Furthermore,the software includes a built-in decoding tool that convertsacquired data (standard binary ﬁles) directly in a ROOTﬁle.The core of the DAQ is the bridge board that hasbeen programmed to work simoultaneously as crate con-troller and I/O register. The system supports both USB(CAEN V1718) and optical link (CAEN V2718) bridgeboards. In the former case even a laptop can be used asDAQ PC (with a maximum allowed transfer rate limited byUSB port ∼1 kHz) while the latter requires only a PCI slotto be accessed. The acquisition and the decoding softwarehas been written in standard C/C++ language in order toenhance its customization capabilities. The system alreadysupports several commercial VME boards (mostly CAENTDC, QDC, ADC, Scaler) and has been tested and usedin a “minimal” and in a “typical” conﬁguration to bench-mark its performances. In order to prevent multiple triggerevents, a dedicated dead-time logic has been implementedtoo.A ﬁrst test has been performed with a NIM pulsedsignal (100 kHz) used as trigger and only the bridge(CAEN V2718) and a QDC (CAEN V792N) have beenacquired. In this basic conﬁguration, a rate of ∼ 20 kHzhas been reached, hence deﬁning the acquisition rate up-per limit. The “typical” conﬁguration comprised the bridge(CAEN V2718), two QDCs (CAEN V792N), one peaksensing ADC (CAEN V785N) and a scaler (CAEN V560)resulting in an acquisition rate of ∼ 10 kHz.In the experiments performed at GSI in the fall 2012,this latter setup was used to measure the shielding proper-ties of different materials for astronauts protection in outerspace (in the framework of ROSSINI project [2],[3]) show-ing very promising results.Figure 1: The DAQ system used during a calibration mea-surement.References[1] H.G. Essel, N. Kurz, The general purpose data acquisitionsystem MBS, IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science, vol.47,no.2, pp.337-339 (2000)[2] C. Schuy et al., GSI Scientiﬁc Report (2012).[3] M. Rovituso et al., GSI Scientiﬁc Report (2012).GSI SCIENTIFIC REPORT 2012 HEALTH-55479

Development of a VME data acquisition system

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Development of a VME data acquisition system

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