General Purpose Fast Data Acquisition

B. Lublinsky, D Herrup
Fermilab


Modern accelerator control requires the collection and manipulation of large quantities of data in response to accelerator-related operations and timing events. We have implemented such a system at Fermilab based on a set of finite state machines which match the operational scenario of the accelerators and allow state-by-state definition of the data collection parameters and the storage of up to 100 KBytes of data in an easily accessible set of circular buffers. The parameters for the finite state machines, states, and buffers are all easily programmable through the Fermilab control system.

The system itself is VxWorks based 68060 in the VME chassis and using Omnybyte digitizers with the data collection rate of up to 5 Mhz and up to 64 Ksamples per measurement. Our future plan is to upgrade ADC with DSP based board, thus allowing for online signal processing and diminishing the amout of data transfered back to the consoles. Initially, the system will acquire turn-by-turn digitization of beam position detectors and provide tune information.