A Generic High Bandwidth Data Acquisition Card for Physics Experiments

In high energy physics and nuclear physics experiments, particularly the ones based on a particle accelerator, the data rate from the detector is usually in the order of terabytes per second. These high throughput data from detector front-end electronics (FEEs) need to be transmitted to the back-end computing farm for high-level event selection and building. A data acquisition (DAQ) system with the features of high density, scalable, and easily upgradeable is crucial to simplify the readout architecture of the whole experiment. This article will introduce the design of a generic high bandwidth PCIe card, which can be used as the important input-output card in a scalable DAQ system. It can factorize FEEs from data handling and reduce the amount of custom hardware in favor of scalable detector-independent commercial hardware and software. Besides the 48 channels of bidirectional high-speed fiber optical links with front ends, it also supports to synchronize with the experiment timing system and to fan-out the clock and trigger information with a fixed latency to the FEEs.