Real-time data transfer in the TCV advanced plasma control system

A high performance system, specially designed for real-time plasma control and event detection on fusion experiments has been developed by the Centro de Fusão Nuclear of the Instituto Superior Técnico (CFN/IST). Presently it is being integrated into the advanced plasma control system of the TCV tokamak. It will substitute the PID controllers and the analogue G matrix of the actual control system with a digital control system based on DSPs to allow an easy change and configuration of the algorithms and parameters used for control. The digital control system needs to exchange a large amount of data among DSPs in every control cycle. The architecture of the digital system and the data transfer among DSPs are described in this paper.