Data acquisition technologies for the PHENIX detector upgrades

PHENIX [1] is one of two large experiments at Brookhaven National Laboratory´s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The summer shutdown of 2010 marked a milestone with the installation of the PHENIX Silicon Vertex Tracker (VTX), the first detector which uses a new generation of readout electronics. In addition to accommodating the new readout electronics in the PHENIX data acquisition, we implemented other significant changes to the system, such as the move to 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks for the components with the highest data volumes. Once fully installed, the new detectors will about triple the current maximum data rate from about 600MB/s to 1.8 GB/s. In Run 11, we have observed a peak rate of about 1400MB/s of compressed data.