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Abstract
The LHCb experiment at CERN has a large number of custom electronics boards performing high-speed data-processing. As in any large experiment the control and monitoring of these crate-mounted boards must be integrated into the overall control-system. Traditionally this has been done by using buses on the back-plane of the crates, such as VME. LHCb has chosen to equip every board with an embedded micro-controller and connecting them in a large Local Area Network. The intelligence of these devices allows complex (soft) real-time control and monitoring, required for modern field programmable gate array (FPGA) driven electronics. Moreover, each board has its own, isolated control access path, which increases the robustness of the entire system. The system is now in pre-production at several sites and will go into full production during next year. The hardware and software will be discussed and experience from the R&D and pre-production will be reviewed, with an emphasis on the advantages and difficulties of this approach to board-control.
Highlights
TRADITIONAL board-control uses shared buses like VME or Compact PCI to control custom or commercial electronics-boards
At a higher level all control functionality in LHCb is integrated in the Experiment Control System (ECS), which is based on a commercial SCADA system
Since the only solution to this problem is to exchange the connectors and 600 modules had already been produced, it was decided to place the network switches required to connect the PCs to the control-system Local Area Network (LAN), within a distance of 10 m
Summary
TRADITIONAL board-control uses shared buses like VME or Compact PCI to control custom or commercial electronics-boards. This approach has proven to work well, it has shown to suffer from at least two drawbacks. The control-paths of a comparatively large number of boards are shared and linked together. LHCb has chosen a different approach and equips every electronics board with a micro-controller, which is accessed via a dedicated Local Area Network (LAN). LHCb will have some 400 boards of 15 different types, with registers to monitor continously.
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