Data acquisition system for E-835 silicon detector

Abstract

In this paper we describe the DAQ system for the silicon pad detector used in experiment E-835 at Fermilab. It is composed of three different electronic boards that perform detector read-out, zero suppression and store data in a VME memory segment. The system is based on high performance VLSI custom components for data encoding and zero suppression to achieve the maximum reliability and performance. Furthermore, all logic functions have been implemented using FPGAs to handle the second level trigger. The whole system has been fully tested at CERN in November 1995 and installed at Fermilab in September 1996.