ATCA/AXIe compatible board for fast control and data acquisition in nuclear fusion experiments

An in-house development of an Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA) board for fast control and data acquisition, with Input/Output (IO) processing capability, is presented. The architecture, compatible with the ATCA (PICMG 3.4) and ATCA eXtensions for Instrumentation (AXIe) specifications, comprises a passive Rear Transition Module (RTM) for IO connectivity to ease hot-swap maintenance and simultaneously to increase cabling life cycle.The board complies with ITER Fast Plant System Controller (FPSC) guidelines for rear IO connectivity and redundancy, in order to provide high levels of reliability and availability to the control and data acquisition systems of nuclear fusion devices with long duration plasma discharges.Simultaneously digitized data from all Analog to Digital Converters (ADC) of the board can be filtered/decimated in a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), decreasing data throughput, increasing resolution, and sent through Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) Express to multi-core processors in the ATCA shelf hub slots. Concurrently the multi-core processors can update the board Digital to Analog Converters (DAC) in real-time. Full-duplex point-to-point communication links between all FPGAs, of peer boards inside the shelf, allow the implementation of distributed algorithms and Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) systems. Support for several timing and synchronization solutions is also provided.Some key features are onboard ADC or DAC modules with galvanic isolation, Xilinx Virtex 6 FPGA, standard Dual Data Rate (DDR) 3 SODIMM memory, standard CompactFLASH memory card, Intelligent Platform Management Controller (IPMC), two PCI Express x4 (generation 2) ATCA Fabric channels (dual-star topology), eleven Xilinx Aurora x1 (or other ATCA compatible communications protocol) ATCA fabric channels (full-mesh topology) and two Fast Ethernet (Precision Time Protocol – PTP IEEE1588-V2 and Lan eXtensions for Instrumentation – LXI compatible) ATCA base channels (dual-star topology).

► High performance board for fast control and data acquisition.
► Large IO channel number per board with galvanic isolation.
► Optimized for high reliability and availability.
► Targeted for nuclear fusion experiments with long duration discharges.
► To be used on the ITER Fast Plant System Controller prototype.