TRB Collaboration

July 2017

• Logic Box -...

  Here's a family picture of all the boards in the Logicbox family. In the middle you can see the two main boards - either a plain power module or the full main board including an FPGA for any kind of signal measurement and manipulation. To the left, two of the three input modules can be seen. In the top corner, the LEMO input module accepting NIM and TTL signals. In the bottom corner the LVDS/TTL input module with pin-headers. Not in the picture is the analog input module with two amplifiers and discriminators to convert signals from, e.g., photo-multipliers. To the right, the two output modules are shown: The LEMO module with NIM or LVTTL outputs as well as the LVDS/TTL output module. The second image is a close-up of the main board - the smallest FPGA module in the TRB family. It was already successfully used as 9-channel TDC with 500 ps binning - albeit limited in rates due to the slow connection to the PC via UART and USB.

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May 2017

• Tip of the week:...

  In case you want to store your CTS settings and load them automatically with the next DAQ startup, the CTS GUI has a handy export feature. It gives you all the settings of the CTS, including comments and speaking names of settings. You can just reference this settings file in your start-up script.

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• Tip of the week:...

  The network map now shows additional information: Besides a (rough, not necessarily complete) list of features implemented in the design, it now shows the unique ID and endpoint ID for each board. For the most common boards, the corresponding serial number is retrieved from the serials.db file and shown as well. Designs including a GbE interface also show their MAC address (in case of single-link designs which are not older than about one year).

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January 2017

• Power Switch

  The new power switch module allows you to switch power to any other hardware remotely. The board can be equipped with both our standard power connectors and each channel is able to stand 50 V or 50 W or 5 A, whatever is reached first. Remote control is possible via USB or any available UART connection, for example via TrbNet and FPGA on a TRB3. The boards can be cascaded to "any" number of channels on a single control interface, as long as the power consumption of the board itself can be met. Features include current measurement on each output and programmable over current protection thresholds. A brief documentation exists.

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• Timing in a FLASH

  A segmented Fast Light Acquiring Start Hodoscope (FLASH) prototype was constructed and tested at the Mainz Microtron (MAMI). Its working principle is based on the detection of Cherenkov light, produced inside radiator bars made of synthetic fused silica, by fast Micro-Channel Plate PMTs (MCP-PMTs). The bars are inclined with respect to the particle trajectory to match the Cherenkov angle to mininmize reflections off the radiator surfaces. The segmentation allows determining a coarse impact position (~few mm) and also repeatedly measuring the arrival time so that an averaging procedure can be used to improve the timing precision. The FLASH protoype is built around the PLANACON 64-channel MCP-PMT with a pore size of 10 micron. The radiator bars (5 x 5.5 x 140 mm^3) are arranged in an 8 x 8 matrix so that each radiator bar matches a pixel on the MCP-PMT. The MCP-PMTs are equipped with NINO-based frontend electronics providing leading edge time and Time-over-Threshold (ToT). The frontend electronics is read out with modified TRB boards where the DC/DC converters were taken off. Two such units were tested using the 855 MeV electron beam of MAMI. The detector response was investigated and the basic characteristics were extracted. The timing performance was studied and the ToT information was used to perform walk corrections. The best timing precision achieved was ~50 ps per FLASH unit. The results are also published here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nima.2017.02.080

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