A VME: Versa Module Europa, crate controller for high speed data acquisition of heterogeneous, multi-detector systems.

Modern day complex experiments in physics demand highly efficient data acquisition (DAQ) systems capable of acquiring a large number of signals with a very high resolution and near zero dead time, without compromising on the event rate handling capability. To cater to the ever growing demands of the DAQ systems, an intelligent controller with a sequencer and an in-built busy logic has been developed. The heart of the controller is a field programmable gate array that provides (a) a sequencer engine, which holds a list of read-write commands that will be executed upon receiving a valid trigger, (b) a dual port random access memory divided into two blocks of 16 kbytes, each of which is configured in a ping-pong fashion to support data acquisition and data transfer functionalities simultaneously, thereby reducing the dead time, (c) a busy logic interface that validates the master strobe or trigger, a scalar for triggers received, and a time stamp engine for time stamping the events with 10 ns interval, (d) the Versa Module Europa (VME) backplane interface for 32 bit data transfer standards of the VME, and (e) a superspeed universal serial bus communication interface to transfer the data to a computer/single board computer (SBC).