Building Integrated Remote Control Systems for Electronics Boards

This paper addresses several aspects of implementing a remote control system for a large number of electronics boards in order to perform remote field programmable gate array (FPGA) programming, hardware configuration, data register access, and monitoring, as well as interfacing it to a configuration database and an expert system. The paper presents a common strategy for the representation of the boards in the abstraction layer of the control system, and generic communication protocols for the access to the board resources. In addition, an implementation is proposed in which the mapping between the functional parameters and the physical registers of the different boards is represented by descriptors in the board representation such that the translation can be handled automatically by a generic translation manager. Using the distributed information management (DIM) package for the control communication with the boards, and the industry SCADA system PVSS II from ETM, a complete control system has been built for the timing and fast control (TFC) system of the LHCb experiment at CERN. It has been in use during the entire prototyping of the TFC system and the developments of the LHCb sub-detector electronics, and is now installed in the online system of the final experiment.