A High Performance FASTCAMAC Crate Controller

50626-98-I A High Performance FASTCAMAC Crate Controller--SV Systems, LLC, 32 Conklin Road, Warwick, NY 10990-3911; (914) 364-0211 Dr. Richard Sumner, Principal Investigator Dr. Richard Sumner, Business Official DOE Grant No. DE-FG02-98ER82682 Amount: $74,437 There is a continuing need in the particle physics community for easy to use, low cost, general purpose high speed data acquisition equipment for laboratory test setups and for small to medium size particle physics experiments. There is no commercial system available that satisfies these requirements, and most users either compromise or develop ad hoc custom solutions. This project will combine FASTCAMAC with Gigabit Ethernet to make a high speed crate controller. This will provide up to 60 megabytes per second data acquisition for personal computers and workstations. Gigabit Ethernet will be the communication link to the host, for both control and data transfer. The resulting crate controller will take advantage of low cost PC and workstation hardware and software and will not require custom designed interfaces to each host computer. The design approach will be studied to verify the feasibility of the project, and the performance possible with standard network driver software will be estimated. A system level prototype of the controller will be constructed with standard components to study the architecture and understand the software requirements of the host computer system. A preliminary design specification and logical design of the complete FASTCAMAC crate controller will be produced. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits as described by the awardee: A high performance FASTCAMAC controller, which is easily portable to most computers and operating systems, should allow FASTCAMAC to satisfy the need for easy to use, low cost, general purpose high speed data acquisition equipment. This will be a major benefit to the particle physics community and also should encourage the design of new high speed FASTCAMAC modules._