DT5215

The DT5215 is the data concentrator of the FERS-5200 platform, designed to manage distributed acquisition systems composed of multiple front-end units and scalable up to thousands of detector channels.

The board provides 8 optical TDlinks, each supporting up to 16 FERS units in daisy chain. With 64-channel FERS modules, a single DT5215 can therefore manage up to 8192 acquisition channels.

The TDlink protocol uses a single optical connection for:

• acquisition data transfer;
• configuration and slow control of FERS units;
• timing and synchronization distribution;
• trigger and timestamp management.

The DT5215 integrates a Linux-based Single Board Computer that collects data from the connected FERS units and performs event building using timestamps and/or Trigger IDs. Event fragments are sorted, merged and formatted before being transferred to the host computer.

Host connectivity is available through:

• 1 Gb Ethernet;
• 10 Gb Ethernet;
• USB 3.0.

The embedded CPU can also run custom data-processing, filtering and reduction algorithms, allowing part of the processing to be performed directly at the concentrator level and reducing the amount of data sent to the central acquisition system.

The architecture is designed for easy scalability. A single FERS unit can initially be used in standalone mode during detector development and later integrated into a larger distributed system without changing the basic readout architecture. Multiple DT5215 concentrators can also be synchronized to build acquisition systems with an even larger number of channels.