Design and Implementation of a Data Transfer Protocol Via Optical Fiber

Future experiments at the new accelerator facility FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research) for research with ion and anti-proton beams require new developments in front-end electronics to tolerate high data rates. We have developed a PCI Express (PCIe) card and front-end cards equipped with the small form-factor pluggable (SFP) transceivers for data transfer via optical fiber. A new protocol has been designed and implemented in FPGAs in order to provide communication between the PCIe card and the front-end cards. The standard data acquisition (DAQ) system at GSI, Multi-Branch System (MBS), has been upgraded to support the PCIe cards and is stable with data transfer rates of 200 Mbytes per second.