The performance of three CAMAC controllers in a real-world simulation

Summary form only given. The performance of three popular CAMAC controllers has been studied. The model 8901A from LeCroy Corporation, the model 3922 from KineticSystems corporation, and the model 73A from Jorway Corporation were connected to a dual processor computer via PCI host adapters. A National Instruments PCI-GPIB card was used for the 8901A, the KineticSystems model 2915 card was used for the 3922, and an ADAPTEC 2940 SCSI card was used for the Jorway 73A. The KmaxNT software environment running in Windows NT provided a convenient testbed. Access to the host adapters was accomplished using the vendor supplied drivers and API libraries. Single word transfer rates, block transfer rates and LAM detection latencies were measured. Data transfer rates were measured by reading data from an SCM-593, CAMAC dataway display. LAMs were detected by running a polling routine in a separate thread on the dual processor host. Transfer times and latencies were measured using high resolution software timers. For block transfer rates, software overhead and bus arbitration times were estimated by observing the transfer times as a function of block size.