The use of USB 3.0 for fast data transfer in a PET detector

The Research Centre Juelich is developing a PET detector for plant phenotyping together with Philips Digital Photon Counting, Aachen. The scientific goal is to study the carbon transport in plants. To detect the photon pairs we use a ring of digital photon counters recently developed by Philips. For the prototype we decided to use a Xilinx Kintex evaluation board for data concentration and processing of the coincidences. It is assumed that the necessary data rate from the FPGA to the acquisition computer is about 300 MByte/s. As data link a 10-gigabit Ethernet link would be preferred, but the evaluation board contains a USB 3.0 interface already, therefore we chose to use this one in order to reduce the development costs.