An FPGA based control unit for synchronization of laser Thomson scattering measurements to plasma events on MAST

The power and flexibility of modern Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) is now being recognised in many areas of instrumentation and control [1], [2] and [3]. The high performance of modern ADCs and the high throughput of FPGAs allow the emulation of many specialised analogue instruments. The functions of heterodyne detection, phase measurements, spectrum analyzers, phase sensitive detectors, counters, etc. can be achieved in relatively simple hardware using an FPGA. The complex filtering functions can be efficiently performed digitally in the FPGA, without recourse to a separate DSP chip. This paper describes the use of a custom off the shelf FPGA board with a collection of custom interface boards to produce a powerful custom trigger system. This has been developed for agile triggering of YAG lasers on MAST. This unit allows various analogue inputs including magnetics data to be processed in real-time and allow Thomson scattering data to be collected at accurate times with respect to randomly occurring MHD phenomena such as neoclassical tearing modes (NTMs). The FPGA allows a ‘System On a Chip’ architecture in order to perform fast filtering in logic coupled to a dedicated soft processor for real-time fixed latency operations and a second soft processor to handle external communications with the control system for system configuration and reporting of status/archived data. The use of such a generic structure in order to provide a common approach, with reduced software development times, for diverse diagnostic situations will be discussed.