Applications of FASTBUS to Beam Diagnostics and Experiment Data Systems

A five-year effort by the North American NIM Committee, in collaboration with the ESONE Committee of European Laboratories, has resulted in a specification for the FASTBUS modular, high-speed data-acquisition system. The system is designed around an emitter-coupled logic (ECL) 32-bit data bus for asynchronous data transmission at 100 ns per transaction. Initial applications of FASTBUS will be in experiment data systems at accelerator facilities worldwide--beam diagnostic data systems on the accelerator side and particle-beam experiment data systems in the experimental area. As the specification (and the resulting hardware and software) matures, real-time machine-control applications will become possible. The FASTBUS specification has been proposed to the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) for standardization in the United States (IEEE-P960), and the specification will be submitted to the international standards bodies for standardization on a worldwide scale in the near future. The details of the new standard are discussed by Costrell and Dawson at this conference. This paper will discuss the near-term use of FASTBUS in accelerator beam-diagnostics instrumentation systems, where an extra increment in system throughput and front-end processing speed can produce a greater understanding of the physical phenomena under study. The arguments and conclusions may be equally well applied to other similar data-handling problems requiring high bandwidth in the data system.