The Fast Readout Unit for General Control and Data Acquisition in Heavy-Ion Experiments

Fast readout unit (FRU) has been designed for generic control and data acquisition (DAQ) in heavy-ion nuclear experiments at the Heavy Ion Research Facility in Lanzhou (HIRFL) to reduce the development time, production cost, and maintenance difficulties of the readout electronics. Microtelecommunications computing architecture (MicroTCA) and MicroTCA systems are compatible with the FRU DAQ advanced mezzanine card (AMC) module. The FRU can connect four front-end readout electronics (FEE) for data collection, packaging, and transmission via optical links. The system’s backplane bus is a high-speed serial PCI Express (PCIe) bus, which is significantly faster than the conventional parallel bus. This article conducts the DAQ system’s performance test and application test. Thus, it has been demonstrated that the system can receive data over an optical link, transmit data over a PCIe link, and restore data. In addition, the AMC standard necessitates the implementation of the module management controller (MMC) onboard to monitor available and system-required hardware management parameters. Thus, the system can accommodate heavy-ion nuclear experiments. This article examines the FRU’s design and performance.