Electronics Engineering Tools for Modern Data Acquisition Systems

The very large number of channels and high data rates in modern particle physics experiments put very stringent requirements on the acquisition of data. To reduce the cost as well as the number of cables required to transport the data from detector to counting room, it is necessary to use very large scale integrated circuits for pre-processing the data right on the front-end circuit boards. Also, very high speed optoelectronic circuits are needed to transport the data on to the counting room from the front-end circuits. Two techniques relevant to data acquisition are discussed. The first is Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA’s), including using the Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language (VHDL) to program them. The second is the design of a very high speed optoelectronic circuit for data transport.