An ATCA-based Prototype Data Readout System for Multi Wire Drift Chamber in Nuclear and Particle Physics Experiment

Track detection is an important method to identify particles in nuclear and particle physics experiments. And multi wire drift chamber (MWDC) is widely used for track detection with good position and time resolution, which possess thousands of output channels. In this paper, a custom data readout system based on advanced telecommunication computing architecture (ATCA) standard is presented, aiming for the readout task of thousands of MWDC channels. The system is composed of two kinds of ATCA modules: The trigger-clock module (TCM) to perform real time track reconstruction based on field programmable gate array (FPGA), the trigger and clock distribution, and the data concentration module (DCM) to collect data from front-end cards (FECs) via 16 optical-fiber serial links and to realize online charge and time information calculation. In the ATCA crate there are one TCM and several DCMs, can meet the readout requirement of thousands of MWDC channels. Through point-to-point data communication of ATCA backplane between DCMs and TCM, it is quite suitable for multi-channel online track reconstruction for MWDC. The prototype system has been successfully implemented and the design concepts and initial test results will be described. It is proved a scalable and flexible solution for track detection in nuclear and particle physics experiment.