Design and Development of a Diagnostics Client for a Beam Loss ...

INTRODUCTION
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Injectors Upgrade project was launched at CERN to
provide higher intensity beam for the LHC, which will allow an increase of its luminosity. A
new Beam Loss Monitoring (BLM) system is under design for the monitoring of the beam
losses and the machine protection. The BLM Dual Polarity (BLEDP) module is the first
stage of that system. The acquisition crate will be able to host up to 8 BLEDP modules
each having 8 analogue inputs to attach various detectors. The BLEDP module should
be able to digitise input current in a wide range from 10 pA up to 200 mA. The total range
is split into two partially overlapping sub-ranges and for each of them a different mea-
surement method is used. The current from 100 mA up to 200 mA should be measured
directly by the ADC as a voltage drop on the input resistor. This method is called Direct
Analogue Digital Conversion (DADC). The current in the lower range from 10 pA to 10 mA
is measured by making use of a low noise Fully Differential Frequency Converter (FDFC).
The BLEDP module is equipped with a Cyclone 4GX150 FPGA which is responsible for
the processing of the FDFC data. In the standalone version of the module a custom made
Ethernet server is implemented in the FPGA. The server is written in the C Programming
Language. [10] Each BLEDP module in the acquisition crate can have a separate Ether-
net link. The measurement data is sent to a dedicated JAVA client application which is the
main subject of this thesis. The task of the client is to send commands to the server, col-
lect, view and store the different types of acquisition data. The application is a Graphical
User Interface (GUI) and makes use of the Java Swing Framework and many other Java
features such as multi-threading and file I/O manipulation.