A Versatile Sampling ADC System for On-Detector Applications and the AdvancedTCA Crate Standard

A data acquisition system based on sampling analog to digital converters (ADCs) and data processing in field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) is presented. Up to 32 ADC channels are combined with reconflgurable logic on a small mezzanine form factor card to get a handy module for analog data acquisition. This module can then be mounted either on a dedicated detector frontend or included in an Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA) crate system. For on-detector usage the system provides several features for fail safe and also fail tolerant operation and data readout. This opens applications in high energy physics detectors with difficult access schemes to the electronic part. The crate system offers on the other hand a high channel density with moderate channel costs. Additionally, the ATCA standard provides enough data bandwidth for online data processing within the crate system. Due to the unified interface of the ADC mezzanine cards, the system cost can be further reduced by an easy up-or downgrade of the ADC sampling frequency or the channel count by exchanging just the mezzanine card and thus maintaining the whole surrounding infrastructure. This enables to serve different detector requirements with a limited number of different mezzanine card types and eases also further enhancements with new upcoming ADC or FPGA devices.