A General Purpose Trigger and Readout Board for HADES and FAIR-Experiments

HADES is a running spectrometer installed at GSI,Germany. PANDA and CBM are planned detector systems for the new FAIR facility at GSI. For these detectors, a general-purpose trigger and readout board (TRB) with on-board DAQ functionality was developed. Data readout and slow control is done via an Etrax processor running Linux and a 100 Mbit/s Ethernet interface. The original motivation and application of the hardware is the implementation of a 128-channel Time to Digital Converter (TDC) electronics based on the HPTDC from CERN (we achieve sigma = 40 ps resolution). However, it has been developed in a way to be detector independent and thus may serve for any high-speed data acquisition by using a flexible add-on board concept (interface connector 15 Gbit/s) and an optical link (2 Gbit/s). A large FPGA (Xilinx Virtex 4 LX40) and a TigerSharc DSP can be used as on-board resources for trigger and on-line analysis algorithms.