• DOI:10.1109/TNS.2011.2157523
• Corpus ID: 47401174

A Large-Scale FPGA-Based Trigger and Dead-Time Free DAQ System for the Kaos Spectrometer at MAMI

@article{Achenbach2011ALF,
  title={A Large-Scale FPGA-Based Trigger and Dead-Time Free DAQ System for the Kaos Spectrometer at MAMI},
  author={Patrick Achenbach and Carlos Ayerbe Gayoso and Jan C. Bernauer and Ralph Bohm and Damir Bosnar and Luka Debenjak and Michael O. Distler and A. Esser and I. Fri{\vs}{\vc}i{\'c} and M. G{\'o}mez Rodr{\'i}guez de la Paz and J. Hoffmann and Mihael Makek and Harald Franz Arno Merkel and Shizu Minami and Ulrich Muller and L G Nungesser and Wolfgang Ott and Josef Pochodzalla and Milan Potokar and I. R. Rusanov and T. R. Saito and Salvador S{\'a}nchez Majos and Bjorn Soren Schlimme and S. {\vS}irca and Stephan Voltz and Kurt Weindel and M. Weinriefer},
  journal={IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science},
  year={2011},
  volume={58},
  pages={1677-1684}
}

• P. Achenbach, C. A. Gayoso, +24 authors M. Weinriefer
• Published 24 May 2010
• Physics
• IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science

The Kaos spectrometer is maintained by the A1 collaboration at the Mainz Microtron MAMI with a focus on the study of (e,e'K+) coincidence reactions. For its electron-arm two vertical planes of fiber arrays, each comprising approximately 10000 fibers, are operated close to zero degree scattering angle and in close proximity to the electron beam. A nearly dead-time free DAQ system to acquire timing and tracking information has been installed for this spectrometer arm. The signals of 144 multianode photomultipliers are collected by 96-channel front-end boards, digitized by double-threshold discriminators and the signal time is picked up by state-of-the-art F1 time-to-digital converter chips. In order to minimize background rates a sophisticated trigger logic was implemented in newly developed Vuprom modules. The trigger performs noise suppression, signal cluster finding, particle tracking and coincidence timing and can be expanded for kinematical matching (e'K+) coincidences. The full system was designed to process more than 4000 read-out channels and to cope with the high electron flux in the spectrometer and the high count rate requirement of the detectors. It was successfully in-beam tested at MAMI in 2009.