Engineering a completely new MicroTCA system can be a daunting task for people with little experience in the MicroTCA field. Since the standard is quite flexible, the 'correct' choice can be sometimes ambiguous. The purpose of this tutorial is to give tips and tricks to people who are relatively new to the MicroTCA systems. It covers many sub-categories of system design including; choosing the...
MTCA-based systems are nowadays widely used at many of DESY's accelerator facilities. A brief review of the current accelerator controls status and some experiences with focus on the used MTCA technology will be shared. After the successful implementation of MTCA at the European XFEL and FLASH facilities meanwhile this hardware standard and platform made its inroads into the various new...
The SPS LLRF system was completely upgraded during CERN Long Shutdown 2 (Jan 2019-March 2020). The new Beam Control implementing the beam-based Loops (radial and phase) and the frequency program (B to revolution frequency) is implemented on the MicroTCA platform. The AFCZ (AMC FMC Carrier with Zynq) and QSFP-RTM are used to interface with ADCs, two White Rabbit networks and 10 Gbps serial...
The University of Hamburg, in collaboration with DESY, is developing an electrical ground-support equipment phasemeter, or phasemeter simulator, based on the MicroTCA.4 standard, for the space-based gravitational wave detector LISA, funded by the German Aerospace Agency (DLR). The main task of the phasemeter is to extract the phase of various laser interferometer beat note signals with...
The Spallation Neutron Source is currently upgrading its accelerator power level from 1.4 MW to 2.8MW via the Proton Power Upgrade Project. This power upgrade requires updates to the RF system, superconducting LINAC, accumulator ring, and conventional facilities. The PPU will deliver 2.0MW to the existing SNS target and 0.8MW will be delivered to the future Second Target Station to facilitate...
To keep the MicroTCA standard viable over many years it must follow the development of technology. A PICMG working group was formed to incorporate faster Ethernet and PCIe communication into the standard. This talk will discuss the direction and challenges of the next generation MicroTCA standard.
After more than 15 years and the 3rd MCH generation being currently deployed, the next generation 4 MCH is will become available soon, providing new features and functions. N.A.T will explain how to transit from today’s MCH to the 4th generation MCH and what the differences and benefits are. Also, the new generation MCH is designed to meet the upcoming requirements addressed by the next...
During last months PICMG mTCA-NG working group carried out channel signal-integrity simulations to find out whether 100GBASE-KR4 Ethernet and PCIe Gen4 and Gen5 are realizable on the mTCA platform. This presentation is intended to give an overview of the work carried out. The structure of the simulated channels and the models will be presented here. In addition, it will be shown how the...
The FPGA Mezzanine Cards (FMCs) are commonly used in various industrial and scientific projects. FMCs are also often used as a modular extension of Advanced Mezzanine Cards (AMCs) in MicroTCA.4 systems.
PICMG (PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group) standard organization is currently working on the extended specification supporting management of FMC modules in MicroTCA.4 systems.
Some...
MTCA workshop for accelerator and physics in Japan 2021 was held from October 26-28 2021 in a virtual format. The goal of this workshop is to boost the application of MTCA in Japan by exchanging the information and experiences. The first day was dedicated for the tutorial session in Japanese and the other two days consisted of oral presentations. The workshop was very successful with more than...
The 2nd MTCA/ATCA workshop in China has been held on-line in August when two years later of the first one. Summary of the workshop will be talked and the overview status of MicroTCA.4 development and applications will also be shown. Website of the workshp: https://indico.ihep.ac.cn/event/14765/
The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) is under construction on Cerro Armazones in Chile. MicroTCA.4 will be used as a basis for the new modular ESO detector controller (NGCII) for all future visible and infrared scientific detectors. Specifically, IR CMOS detectors are the most commonly used detector type for the ELTs first generation of instruments. The presentation gives an insight into how...
Ground based astronomical observatories often require electrical equipment to reside out in the open air close to the telescope and instrument optics. The telescope and instrument optics are extremely sensitive to air currents caused by the warm electronics operating in domes open to the cool night air. In order to avoid these air currents the ANU in collaboration with ESO has undertaken to...
The LLRF of the CERN SPS has gone through a complete renovation during the Long Shutdown 2019-2020. The upgrade was motivated by the High Luminosity LHC project (HL-LHC) that calls for the doubling of the SPS beam intensity .
Installation of two additional cavities and the obsolescence of the aging electronics required the redesign of the 200MHz cavity-controller system (RF feedback) and of...
MedAustron is a synchrotron-based particle therapy center located in Wiener Neustadt, Austria. The acceleration of the protons and heavy ions is achieved through a LINAC injector followed by a synchrotron, featuring three irradiation rooms for particle therapy and one room for non-clinical research. In the course of an ongoing development project, the LINAC LLRF will be upgraded to a...
At Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin (HZB), it is planned to apply mTCA.4 technology for the LLRF control of two of its accelerator facilities: BESSY-II and SeaLab. BESSY-II is a 3rd generation Synchrotron Light Source in operation since 1998 and focused on the generation of soft X-rays, complementing this way PETRA-III at DESY. It comprises a booster ring with one PETRA-type 500MHz normal conducting...
A new Zone 3 Class RF1.0 was first announced on the MTCA WS in 2018. The preliminary specification of the Class RF1.0 was presented in 2019. Maesurements with signal frequencies of up to 3 GHz indicated a high potential of the used connectors.
Now the first AMC - RTM comnbination with the Class RF1.0 has been built to test the RF performance of the CLass RF1.0. A new custom SMD footprint for...
The DeRTM-LOG1300, a MicroTCA.4 compliant LO and CLK generation module, has been successfully in operation at XFEL and FLASH for several years. With the company KVG Quartz Crystal Technology GmbH we started a collaboration in order to produce additional LO and CLK modules. At the same time, other machines require different LO and CLK frequencies. Not all of these frequency requirements can be...
At the ELBE accelerator center a new timing system is being developed based on the MRF hardware platform. It uses two mTCA-EVM-300 configured as masters and a scalable number of connected receivers (mTCA-EVR-300U, PCIe-EVR-300) to generate flexible pulse patterns for operating the machine. It allows for independent operation of two electron injectors and offers the opportunity for a combined...
At DESY we are in the technical design phase for the upgrade of the PETRA III synchrotron light source towards a 4th generation low emittance machine PETRA IV.
Within this major machine upgrade also almost every electronics for the accelerator controls will be renewed. As the Platform of choice MTCA.4 shall become the new standard.
Because of the good experience with the DESY developed...
The Hefei Advanced Light Facility (HALF) is a fourth-generation vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) and X-ray diffraction limit synchrotron radiation (DLSR) light source now under preliminary research. To achieve ultralow beam emittance and small beam size, the orbit of the beam in DLSR storage ring should meet the stability requirement at submicron scale. The beam position monitor (BPM) electronics...
Powerful hardware boards are key components for future installations at DESY and other facilities. To complete the portfolio, three new AMC were projected. All new cards base on the XILINX MPSoC FPGAs which provide an exceptionally convenient way for user application development, integration and maintenance - allowing the use of high-level programming languages such as Python or...
In the past year, ChimeraTK's DeviceAccess library has seen some major improvements. A new backend is available for the Xilinx XDMA PCI express driver. This brings direct support for all recent Xilinx FPGAs, not only for data I/O but also for PCI express user interrupts. The latter was possible by introducing support for push-type variables to all built-in backends, which means a processing...
The Module Management Controller (MMC) is a mandatory component of every AMC board. DESY is developing, maintaining and licensing a turn-key MMC solution that is used on several hundred boards in different facilities - on DESY's own products as well as on third-party AMC boards developed by industrial customers and project partners.
With the growing number of different boards, a clear...
The MicroTCA is a key platform at the European X-Ray Free Electron Laser facility (European XFEL), being at the centre of timing distribution, data processing from large 2D detectors, fast digitization and processing of pulse signals as well as low latency communication protocol for VETO and Machine Protection Systems.
Following on our internal review from last year, we focus on integrating...
The Lodz University of Technology, Department of Microelectronics and Computer Science is involved in the development of MicroTCA.4, MicroTCA.4.1 and the future standards from 2007 onwards. Since that time, we have developed various MicroTCA.4 components including Intelligent Platform Management, Advanced Mezzanine Cards (AMCs), Rear Transition Modules (RTMs) for data acquisition and...
Universal, scalable image acquisition system based on MTCA.4 standard designed and developed by the Department of Microelectronics and Computer Science in Lodz University of Technology is constantly being expanded with support for new cameras and interfaces. For more than 10 years we have been collaborating with several research institutions like ITER, W7X, DESY to collect requirements and...
In my presentation I will give an overview of MTCA hardware, which is relevant for photon science experiments. I will show commercially available products and new developments including the new motion controller. By showing possible applications for PETRA-IV I will point out the advantages of MTCA.
The Mu2e experiment, currently under construction at Fermilab, will use a pulsed beam structure to significantly improve limits on the rates of charged lepton flavor violating muon decay processes. The time structure of the pulsed beam is measured by the extinction monitor, comprised of scintillation counters and a silicon pixel detector telescope, which are read out using a data acquisition...
In todays advanced and digital world traditional analog signal acquisition and processing are gradually shifting to digital domain to meet the needs of the hour. In the field of energy dispersive x-rays detectors traditional analog signal processing involves a pre-amplifier to amplify the signal, a shaping amplifier to detect the energy of the incident photon, and a multichannel analyzer (MCA)...
In order to minimize the latency of Sirius Fast Orbit Feedback (FOFB), a 12-channel current source power supply was designed as a μRTM module. Each channel consists of a linear amplifier operating as current source by means of a digital feedback loop implemented on an FPGA at the AMC board. The amplifier is specified to reach up to 10 kHz small-signal bandwidth on a 3.5 mH...
In the scope of the TDR phase for the future PETRA IV low-emittance ring upgrade project, special attention is being dedicated to the prototyping of the future BPM electronics. The large machine will use a large number of BPM pickups, around 800, and the requirements for each system will be stringent for what regards resolution, accuracy and long-term stability. To acquire and process all the...
BESSY II operates with special fill patterns that include transversely moving bunches, which should be ignored in the calculation of the beam postion. To enable this, a system of four 1 GS/s ADCs is used to acuire the button amplitudes with the required fidelity. This talk will present the status of our plans, including aspects of MTCA crate, ADC and FPGA selections, as well as sample clock...
BPM electronics at SOLEIL also embed the FOFB communication and computation.
As these electronics come to an obsolescence, we aim at a new orbit feedback system.
A dedicated standalone microTCA based platform is envisioned for this new system. This new architecture composed of cell and central nodes will (among other tasks) collects the BPM data, computes and send to the correctors the...
