ICALEPCS 2009
WEB002
FPGA Mezzanine Cards for CERN's Accelerator Control System
J.H.Lewis, J.Serrano, J.Serrano*, M.Cattin, T.Wlostowski (CERN)
Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have become a key player in modern real time control systems. They offer determinism, simple design, high performance and versatility. A typical hardware architecture consists of an FPGA interfaced with a control bus and a variable number of digital IOs, ADCs and DACs depending on the application. Until recently the low-cost hardware paradigm has been using mezzanines containing a front end interface plus custom logic (typically an FPGA) and a local bus that interfaces the mezzanine to a carrier. As FPGAs grow in size and shrink in price, hardware reuse, testability and bus access speed could be improved if the user logic is moved to the carrier. The new FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC) Vita 57 standard is a good example of this new paradigm. In this paper we present a standard kit of FPGA carriers and IO mezzanines for accelerator control. Carriers form factors will be VME, uTCA and PCIe. The carriers will feature White Rabbit support for accurate synchronization of distributed systems. Initial plans include IO mezzanines for 100MS/s ADCs and DACs, digital drivers and inputs, high accuracy time tag units and fine delay generators.