A low-cost galvanic isolated fast PCI transient recorder with signal processing capabilities

A new transient recorder module architecture was developed to fulfil many of today’s requirements of data acquisition for plasma diagnostics on fusion experiments. This architecture is supported by the availability of new high-density devices in the fields of digital signal processors and programmable logic devices, which can provide features such as multi-channel data readout in real-time, real-time digital signal processing and a large quantity of onboard memory. This paper describes the design and implementation of a transient recorder module in compliance with this new architecture, which, along with the developed software, can be efficiently used either as a stand-alone or integrated in a multi-unit data acquisition system. The module encloses all aforementioned capabilities in an eight-channel peripheral component interconnect (PCI) unit. All channels are differential, galvanic isolated at 1 kV and over-voltage protected. Acquisition rate is 2 M samples per second with 14-bit resolution. Local data storage capacity is 256 M samples.