FPGA based High Speed Data Acquisition System for High Energy Physics Application

Abstract

In high energy physics experiments (HEP), high speed and fault resilient data communication is needed between detectors/sensors and the host PC. Transient faults can occur in the communication hardware due to various external effects like presence of charged particles, noise in the environment or radiation effects in HEP experiments and that leads to single/multiple bit error. In order to keep the communication system functional in such a radiation environment where direct intervention of human is not possible, a high speed data acquisition (DAQ) architecture is necessary which supports error recovery. This design presents an efficient implementation of field programmable gate array (FPGA) based high speed DAQ system with optical communication link supported by multi-bit error correcting model. The design has been implemented on Xilinx Kintex-7 board and is tested for board to board communication as well as for PC communication using PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect express). Data communication speed up to 4.8 Gbps has been achieved in board to board and board to PC communication and estimation of resource utilization and critical path delay are also measured.