Evaluation of IEEE 1394 serial bus for distributed data acquisition

One trend in accelerator instrumentation is the digitization of signals further upstream in the signal processing chain. In some systems, this leads to distributed data sources that must be interconnected in a standard way. IEEE 1394 Serial Bus provides a possible interconnection standard for these systems. With Serial Bus, data acquisition is implemented via memory to memory transfers within a distributed 64 bit address space. Because this functionality is provided in silicon, software overhead is significantly reduced. This technology is under evaluation for use in the RHIC position monitor system. Using this example system, the suitability of IEEE 1394 for the accelerator environment is described. Also, the results from recent tests are presented.