15th Topical Conference on High Temperature Plasma Diagnostics, 19 a 22 de Abril de 2004, San Diego, USA

	PCI Data Acquisition and Signal Processing Hardware Modules for Long Pulse Operation
	J. Sousa, A. J. N. Batista, A. Combo, R. Pereira, Miguel Correia, N. Cruz, P. Carvalho, Carlos Correia e C.A.F. Varandas
	Resumo
	Diagnostics and control systems for fusion experiments require challenging features from the supporting data acquisition subsystems. New hardware architectures which include devices such as Digital Signal Processors, Field Programmable Gate Arrays, SDRAM memory modules, Gigabit logic and others, combined with the features of high performance data transfer buses, help implementing functionalities such as: real-time multi-channel signal processing, enough onboard fast storage memory to operate for large periods and a wide range of reprogrammable hardware functions according to the specificities of each diagnostic. A set of PCI modules built at CFN that include these functionalities are described: a 2 MSPS, 14-bit, 8 channels galvanic isolated transient recorder; a 200 MSPS, 8-bit, 4 channels pulse digitizer; a 8 independent channels Time-to-Digital-Converter with a resolution/dead-time of 0.4 ns and a peak event rate of 1.25 Gevents/s/channel; all modules include up to 512 MB of memory.