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

Design and Development of a Diagnostics Client for a Beam Loss Measurement System at CERN
FPGA device giving the possibility of a custom made server. This way a client application
can communicate directly with the modules in order to collect and manipulate the different
types of data provided by the server. The aim of this test system is the development, test
and validation of the new acquisition system, as well as to later serve as a standalone
measurement system. A graphical idea of how this new test system looks like is shown in
Figure 7.
4.2 FPGA Firmware and Embedded Server
A block diagram of the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) system architecture is
shown in Figure 4.2. This architecture is used for the Gigabit Ethernet Readout in the
BLEDP firmware. It consists of two parts. The first one is the custom User logic and the
other one a System-On-a-Chip (SOC), generated by the Altera tools. [10]
Figure 8: Architecture of the Nios-II system used for the Gigabit Ethernet Readout in the BLEDP
firmware
More details regarding the block diagram, namely the user logic and the SOC, can be
found on [10].
Most of the components included in the embedded software are provided by Altera and
other vendors. The advantage of that solution is the very short time from a specification to
a first working prototype. Another advantage of the ready-made software libraries is the
availability of numerous services like ICMP, DHCP, etc.
The only custom software implemented for the BLEDP module is the server application. It
is written in the C programming language and is a single-threaded application. The server
creates a standard TCP/IP socket which listens for incoming client connections. It is lim-
ited to listen for only one client at a time and where there are requests for more clients
the connection is refused. The server is parsing incoming commands and disables or en-
Emmanouil I. Angelogiannopoulos 23