Multichannel measurement system for extended SXR plasma diagnostics based on novel radiation-hard electronics

Abstract

This work refers to the soft X-Ray (SXR) plasma diagnostics system being developed. The goal is to compute SXR spectra − energetically and topologically with means of Gas Electron Multiplier (GEM) detector. The system has two sections: the analog signal acquisition part (installed at the GEM detector), and the signal processing part (located in the rack). PCI-Express Gen2 interface and DDR3 memory are used for data transmission, storage and buffering. Xilinx Artix7 FPGAs in the signal processing part perform signal acquisition functions. One data acquisition module (DQM) of the system is capable of processing up to 64 analog input channels in real-time. Acquired data is transferred to the embedded PC for post-processing − including cluster reconstruction and spectrograms computation in offline mode. Advanced low-level control software and signal processing algorithms (Matlab) integration was performed. Effort has been carried out in order to integrate different parts of the system. As a result of previous work and recent achievements in system development, first spectra measurements were performed with connected GEM detector and 55Fe SXR test source.