A Back-End Electronics Based on Fiber Communication for Small to Medium-Scale Physics Experiments

TL;DR

This paper presents a flexible, FPGA-based back-end electronics system with fiber communication supporting various interfaces and protocols, designed for small to medium-scale physics experiments, and validated through multiple experimental applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel daughter-motherboard FPGA-based electronics design with integrated TLU functions and flexible interfaces tailored for small to medium physics experiments.

Findings

Supports 32 optical fiber interfaces at 400Mbps each

Provides 16 high-speed communication channels with several Gbps bandwidth

Successfully used in experiments like PandaX-III, VLAST, and CERN beam tests

Abstract

Many small and medium-sized physics experiments are being conducted worldwide. These experiments have similar requirements for readout electronics, especially the back-end electronics. Some experiments need a trigger logic unit(TLU) to provide timing and synchronous control signals. This paper introduces a back-end electronics design for small and medium-sized physics experiments; it adopts a daughter-motherboard structure integrated TLU function to provide greater flexibility. Different interfaces and protocols can be flexibly selected according to data bandwidth requirements. It supports 32 optical fiber interfaces based on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) of normal IOs with 400Mbps of data bandwidth for each channel. At the same time, it supports 16 high-speed communication interfaces based on GTX port with several Gbps data bandwidth of each channel. For the TLU function, this design has 8 HDMI interfaces and one RJ45 interface to provide synchronous triggers and other control signals, and it has six analog LEMOs and four digital LEMOs to accept asynchronous signals from an external source. These design specifications can meet the needs of most small and medium-sized experiments. This set of back-end electronics has been successfully used in experiments such as PandaX-III, VLAST, and moungraphy. Moreover, it has successfully conducted beam tests with a readout of the data of VLAST detectors at CERN.