New control system for the 50 MeV linear accelerator of TLS

The pre-injector of the Taiwan Light Source (TLS) is consists of a 140 kV thermionic gun and a 50 MeV travelling wave type linear accelerator (linac) system. A linac control system has been renewed to avoid obsolescence. It is also utilized to improve performance, decouple the vacuum interlock logic from the linac control system, and provide a better control functionality for top-up operation. One VME crate system is dedicated for the linac control, the new hardware equipped with high resolution of analogue interface to provide better control. Vacuum interlock logic will be done via a dedicated programmable logic controller (PLC). The remained linac devices, which are necessary for sequential control such as door access interlock, klystron warm up, gun warm up, trigger interlock, gun high voltage interlock, klystron modulator high voltage interlock, water flow interlock, will be done by another PLC. Both interlock and sequential control of PLC will be controlled by the VME crate. All of the other functions without interlock or sequence requirement will be controlled by the VME crate directly as well. New control system is expected to provide better control functionality, better performance, easy for maintenance, and useful easy to add new hardware equipments.