Low Cost, High-Density Digital Electronics for Nuclear Physics

The DOE supports development of technologies essential to experiments in nuclear physics. The channel count of modern nuclear physics experiments has risen into thousands. There is need for cost effective, high density data acquisition (DAQ) systems with many thousands of channels capable of in situ signal analysis to avoid storing vast quantities of raw waveform data. Our approach will permit development of large scale, digital DAQ systems at cost comparable with the application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) implementations. We will develop cost effective digital DAQ modules providing dozens of channels of waveform digitization, on-board FPGA, Ethernet, USB-2, and VME interfaces, and on-board processor running Linux. The digitizers will participate in a novel system architecture that will enable building DAQ systems with thousands of channels. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits: Future applications will include nuclear physics, high energy physics, nuclear astrophysics, homeland security, and education. Public will benefit through electronics that will be more flexible and cheaper than current electronics.