Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Konrad, Martin" <[email protected]> · Tue, 7 Apr 2015 14:06:11 +0000

Hi Emmanuel,
> I am looking for a contact at FRIB, who could give me more
> information on the FRIB General Purpose Digital Board (FGPDB).
This board is MTCA.4 compatible. As a special feature it can be used 
either in a MTCA chassis or in stand-alone mode - but in contrast to 
BNL's NYC-flavored device our pizza box will contain rather the 
Chicago-style deep-dish Pizza ;-)

RTMs are supported. Note however that by default the FGPDB comes with a 
40 pair zone 3 connector which makes it incompatible with most other 
RTMs. But it can also be equipped with a 30 pair connector (no changes 
to the PCB required). For maximum flexibility the connections to the RTM 
are fully digital (66 pairs differential or 132 single-ended, two pairs 
differential clocks, two MGTs).

The board comes with a Spartan 6 FPGA to keep cost low (roughly $1000 a 
piece) and contains 2 Gbit DDR3 memory. You can extend the card with an 
FMC card.

The board contains a clock distribution framework that can act as a 
clock source (e.g. as an EVR that provides triggers and clocks to the 
MCH/other AMCs) and as a clock consumer (e.g. digitizer card).

On the backplane the board supports one PCIe lane and one GbE interface. 
Additional general purpose transceivers are available, some of them as 
SFP connectors at the front-panel that can be used for stuff like 
GbE/timing/proprietary high-speed links...

For GPIO the board contains some connectors that are intended to be used 
in Pizza-box mode. Two LEMO connectors at the front panel are intended 
for triggers.

For the MTCA management controller I ported DESY's management code 
(latest release). Functionality includes backplane e-keying, IPMI read 
out of sensors for temperature, voltages, and currents, hot-plugging, 
RTM management, serial console,... Note that most of these features are 
only available if the board is used in a MTCA chassis.

Planned applications include RF controls, fast machine protection 
system, beam loss monitors etc. - in total more than 500 boards for FRIB.

I guess I'm not allowed to share documentation/schematics of our latest 
version with you without approval (they take export controls regulations 
very seriously here). But you can find the schematics of an older 
version on the web [1]. If you need further information/documentation 
please contact Arthur who is developing the board. He was planning to 
get the same kind of data on the web for the latest revision as well.

Regarding EPICS support we are planning to share code with DESY, SLAC, 
and ESS.

HTH,

Martin

[1] http://frib.msu.edu/content/frib-general-purpose-digital-board

-- 
Martin Konrad
Control System Engineer
Facility for Rare Isotope Beams
Michigan State University
640 South Shaw Lane
East Lansing, MI 48824-1321, USA
Tel. 517-908-7253
Email: [email protected]

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System