The New Beam Diagnostic Data Readout and Signal Processing System at LNL

The ongoing upgrade campaign at the INFN National Laboratories of Legnaro, required to accommodate the selective production of exotic species (SPES) facility, demands for a new beam diagnostic system that outperforms the legacy versabus module eurocard-based current and beam position monitor. The beam diagnostic is an essential component without whom the operator would blindly attempt to setup all accelerator parameters in order to transport the beam from the source to the target experiment. This paper provides a complete overview of the diagnostic data readout chain inclusive of custom hardware solutions, signal processing, and data management. Each diagnostic point, installed along the beam pipe, consists of a Faraday cup and a beam profile monitor. The front-end electronics is based on a custom general purpose motherboard endowed with an field programmable gate array that handles the data sampling, data filtering, and data buffering and with a computer on module that runs an EPICS input-output controller application and bridges the beam diagnostic information to the control network for remote visualization. The custom hardware platform at the heart of the diagnostic system is able to perform real-time tasks and allows for hardware standardization and modularity, then being the base for embedding the control of several different appliances in our accelerators complex. A precise beam current and position measurement is required by the SPES project that foresees a radioactive ion beam in a wide range of intensities and energies. The prototypes of the new electronics have shown good performance improvements and the beam current resolution has been extended to a few pA.