Developments to Supplant CAMAC with Industry Standard Technology at NSTX

Abstract

NSTX, like other research programs, is facing an inevitable crisis due to end-of-life issues for its 20-year-old CAMAC instrumentation. In many cases replacement components are not available, effectively rendering a CAMAC module unusable after a failure. The proliferation of high-performance, reliable, low-cost commodity computing hardware and software based on industry standard technology can provide the basis for a new generation of instrumentation. At NSTX, there have been several advances towards developing a PCI-based model for data acquisition and control systems. New hardware developments include a High Performance Signal Conditioning board and an FPGA-based Multifunction Timing System. Extensible software interfaces have been developed to integrate these boards into the NSTX computing environment. This paper will illustrate these developments and how they could be used to benefit collaborative fusion research.