A prototype fully digital data acquisition system upgrade for the TOFOR neutron spectrometer at JET

A prototype of a fully digital data acquisition system upgrade for the TOFOR time-of-flight fusion neutron spectrometer at JET has been implemented and evaluated. The core of the system is composed of five fast PXIe waveform digitisers (1 GSPS, 12 bits) with large internal fast memory (1 GB). Due to the complexity and high requirements on timing precision of the spectrometer, the design and implementation of such a system poses numerous technical challenges, in particular regarding time alignment and synchronisation of signal paths and digitiser modules. These issues and their solutions, as pertaining to the TOFOR spectrometer, are presented in detail in the present paper. As a final assessment of the ability of the new data acquisition system to reproduce the capabilities of the original TOFOR system, a thorough comparison of results produced using both systems is presented. The comparison with TOFOR has been performed with satisfying results. Two immediate advantages of the new data acquisition system are significantly improved triggering dead time (from about 70 ns to 10 ns) and the ability to adjust the triggering thresholds as needed during the analysis step. The enhanced spectroscopic capabilities of the new data acquisition system will be reported on in future publications.