Real-time data acquisition and processing system based on ITER Plant Fast Controller and FlexRIO FPGA

Abstract

Measurement and control of the plasma in real-time are critical for advanced Tokamak operation. It requires high speed real-time data acquisition and processing. ITER has designed the Plant Fast Controllers (PFC) for these purposes. At J-TEXT Tokamak, a real-time data acquisition and processing system has been developed using standard ITER PFC technologies. FlexRIO FPGA devices are used to implement real-time data applications. With FlexRIO devices, data can be processed by FPGA in real-time before they are past to the CPU. The FPGA is able to extract phase-shift information from the intermediate frequency signal produced by the polarimeter-interferometer diagnostic system and calculate plasma density profile in real-time. Different algorisms implementations on the FlexRIO FPGA are compared in the paper. This system is developed using ITER PFC standard hardware. The software is developed using a J-TEXT developed real-time framework. It runs under Red Hat Enterprise Linux MRG-R and use Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) for monitoring and configuration which are ITER PFC standard technology.