Remote slow control for the future AGATA FEE

Prometeo Workshop on Front-end electronics for gammaand complementary detector systems

17th-18th November 2011 – IFIC (Valencia)

Diego Barrientos

Introduction Firmware development Simulation Hardware testbench Software development Results Conclusions and further work

Outline

Large projects with high-speed data rates

Several complex electronic devices

Definition of the electronic boards in the system Initialization with register values or procedures Storing configuration parameters for backup Monitoring some key parameters Handling error/alarm events and notifying them Acceptance of simple commands for control

Introduction: Slow control

Introduction: AGATA electronics

Introduction: AGATA electronics

Introduction: AGATA electronics

Introduction: AGATA electronics

One optical lane but multiple buses/registers

Multi-Gigabit Transceivers◦ 8B/10B encoding◦ Control messages, data flow◦ Error handling

Custom protocol◦ Xilinx RocketIO◦ Aurora

Firmware development

Aurora

Project structure

Simulation

Virtex-4 ML423 Ev. Board Virtex-5 ML507 Ev. Board

1st test: Virtex-4 loopback (Switches & LEDs) 2nd test: Virtex-4/Virtex-5 (Switches & LEDs) Final test: Virtex-4/Virtex-5 (I2C device)

Hardware testbench

Analog Devices AD5254

Analog Devices AD5254

Virtex-5 PowerPC

Integrated peripheral:◦ RS232-UART◦ Switches/LEDs◦ Slow control interface

C functions developed

Software development

Final setup

Slow control interface for the new AGATA digitizers

Mirror registers synchronized through serial link Firmware validation with Xilinx Ev. Boards

Conclusions

Incoming prototypes for the new preprocessing and digitizer electronics

Design and validation of the digitizer’s control card

Firmware integration in the whole system

Future work

Thank you!