AT-TPC Wiki

CoBo: Concentration Board, is a custom printed circuit board (PCB), firmware, and embedded software for the GET (General Electronics for time projection chamber (TPC)) project. CoBo, intelligently, reads, reduces, and concentrates the high data throughput of TPC detectors.

CoBo interfaces with three major components:

1. Asad (ASIC-ADC) board via 68-pin VHDCI cables. Asad hosts upto 4 AGET chips.
2. Mutant (MUltiplicity Trigger ANd Time) board via MicroTCA backplane: CLK2, CLK3, PORT1, and PORTS<8:11>.
3. Controller and storage farm via GbE connections.

CoBo is μTCA compatible. i.e. PICMG® AMC.0 R1.0. and is hosted in MicroTCA chassis (VadaTech VT893). The chassis is capable of hosting 11 CoBo cards. In the AT-TPC project, we will only utilize 10 cards and a single MicroTCA chassis. Each CoBo card is connected to 4 Asad boards and each Asad board is connected to 256 (channels) sensors in the detector (MicroMegas). The entire AT-TPC system is capable of processing 10240 channels.

TPC analog signals are passed to AGET chips (designed at CAE) where they are conditioned and compared, then they are converted to the digital domain using the ADCs (Analog-to-Digital-Convert) on the Asad board (designed at CENBG) and communicated to CoBo. Multiple CoBo board are orchestrated by the Mutant (Multiplicity and Trigger board designed at GANIL) via the MicroTCA backplane to concentrate and readout the data.

The design, hardware, firmware and/or software are copyright protected and are proprietary property of Michigan State University ©2013. (TEC2011-0083).

• Purchasing CoBo
• Pending Orders

List of all fabricated CoBo boards to date.

CoBo hardware, firmware, and software is developed at NSCL. The generic embedded software for AGET chip is developed by IRFU (CEA) and is used on Mutant, CoBo, and PC farm. See DAQ Setup for details.

Responsibilities:

• NSCL:

1. Xilinx ML507 test platform and daughter board for CoBo (Nathan Usher)
2. CoBo Hardware design, implementation, and testing (Faisal T. Abu-Nimeh)
3. CoBo Firmware
4. Embedded Software: development and testing (Faisal T. Abu-Nimeh)
5. MicroTCA development (based on VT028) (Faisal T. Abu-Nimeh)

• IRFU:

1. VxWorks GET Embedded Software (Patrick Sizun and Shebli Anvar)
   1. NSCL quick installation for GET software

A simplified depiction of the GET system is shown in the figure. A time project chamber hosting a 10240-pad MicroMega is connected to a smart protection board then fed to the AGET chips hosted on the Asad board. Every CoBo is then connected to 4 Asad boards using 4 dedicated VHDCI connectors on the front panel. The processed data is passed down to the Mutant as well as sent out using GbE to the storage farm.

The reduced CoBo is implemented on a Xilinx ML507 demonstration board. It can instrument one AsAd card only, via an adapter board designed by NSCL. The latest version of this adapter board (v2.0) connects to the AsAd versions 2.0 and above via a regular VHDCI cable. The firmware corresponding to this latest version can be found here. Please use right-click to download the file from this link (otherwise your browser will try to open it as a PDF file), and change the extension of the file to .bit instead of .pdf after download. The .pdf extension is used because of restrictions on the wiki server.