Development of uTCA hardware for BAM system at FLASH and XFEL

This paper describes the design of a uTCA modular card system suited for conversion, sampling and processing of optical pulses. The system consists of a uTCA carrier card along with a double width FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC) with a changeable optical frontend. The cards were designed for the needs of the BAM system of the FLASH and XFEL accelerators at the DESY facility in Hamburg. The carrier board contains a very powerful FPGA, all required uTCA circuits along with digital interfaces. The FMC card mainly contains four 16-bit fast Analog-to-digital converters (up to 250 MSPS), ADC clock generation and distribution modules, two SFP connectors and a specialized dual RS-485 connection. This paper describes such issues as system organization into universal digital circuits and specialized analog and clock circuits to allow high speed real-time analysis of the properties of the high-bandwidth optical signals of the BAM system and better control of the accelerator beam.