A Data Acquisition System for Elementary Particle Physics

The data acquisition system experiment 605 at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory employs a set of data transfer protocols developed at Columbia University and implemented in the Nevis Laboratories Data Transport System. We describe the logical design of the Transport System, its physical realization, and its particular application during the Spring, 1982 data run of experiment 605. During that run it served as the interface between the data latches and a megabyte of fast memory, operating at a data transfer rate of 200 nsec/16-bit word. Up to two thousand events were read out during the one second beam spill, each event consisting of about 250 words. We include details of proposed improvements to the data acquisition system and append a brief comment of the need for inexpensive, versatile readout systems in experimental elementary particle physics.