As a sub-contractor of Aurion Anlagentechnik GmbH, BEAPLAS has developed an electronic plattform tailored to customers requirements.
The purpose of this Trigger- and Data-Acquisition-Plattform is the management and hand-over of fast trigger-signals. These triggers are created by the customers system and are transferred over fibre- or coaxial-cables. Complementing the system with digitizers cablable of 16bit resolution, it is possible to measure analog values synchroneous or asynchroneous with a trigger event.
The following list summarized the features:
- Combination of FPGA and MCU
- Industrial communication interface (Anybus, e.g. ProfiNet)
- Several sources for triggers
- Several outputs for triggers
- I/O-delay of less than 100 ns
- Four external and four internal analog inputs with 16bit resolution
- Selectable analog and digital routing of measured values
The customer uses this plattform for time-critical generation of high-voltage pulses and the measurement and processing of their timing as well as their amplitude.
Because of the low rise-time of the high-voltage pulses, a frontend amplifier measuring the pulses and amplifying them for the transfer over several meters of coaxial cable has been developed by BEAPLAS.
While working on this project, several necessities for changing the specification have aroused. Thus, unforseeable challenges could be addressed and accomplished. Furhtermore, additional whishes of the customer were realized which came up during the project.
This has been enabled by our agile design approach and by the proactive combination of hardware and software.
For the realization of the Trigger- and Data-Acquisition-Plattform this meant in effect an ongoing dialog with the customer and the facilitation of programmable hardware. Required changes could thus be implemented as a relatively simple adjustment of the firmware.