An FPGA Based Implementation for Real-Time Processing of the LHC Beam Loss Monitoring System´s Data

The strategy for machine protection and quench prevention of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) is mainly based on the beam loss monitoring (BLM) system. At each turn, there will be several thousands of data to record and process in order to decide if the beams should be permitted to continue circulating or their safe extraction is necessary to be triggered. The processing involves a proper analysis of the loss pattern in time and for the decision the energy of the beam needs to be accounted. This complexity needs to be minimized by all means to maximize the reliability of the BLM system and allow a feasible implementation. In this paper, a field programmable gate array (FPGA) based implementation is explored for the real-time processing of the LHC BLM data. It gives emphasis on the highly efficient successive running sums (SRS) technique used that allows many and long integration periods to be maintained for each detector´s data with relatively small length shift registers that can be built around the embedded memory blocks.