Use of fiber-optics for real-time control and data acquisition

The practical use of commercially available fiber-optic components for high-speed control of and readout from a small prototype of an electronics data acquisition system for a high-energy physics detector has been demonstrated. This is the SVX microvertex detector system being readied for CDF (Collider Detector at Fermilab). The fiber-optic components include the AMD TAXI parallel/serial transmitter and receiver sets and Hewlett-Packard HFBR 1414 optical transmitters and HFBR 2416 receivers. The SVX chip is controlled by a 12-b field, which is updated via the optical fiber every clock cycle. Digital data are generated by the SVX every cycle and returned to the host system via a separate fiber. In this demonstration, the cycle time was set to ~200 ns; extension to 100 ns is planned. The prototype test system set up at the Lawrence Berkeley laboratory is described, and performance results are given. The expansion of this prototype system to the operation of a full-scale microvertex physics detector front-end system is also discussed