GBTX emulation for bm@n/mpd data acquisition systems

Abstract

The GBTX chip is widely used in high-energy experiments. However, due to export restrictions, it cannot be used in NICA. There is significant synergy in building readout chains for CBM and NICA experiments. To fully utilize this synergy, it is important to emulate the essential GBTX functionality in FPGA. For that purpose, the emulator of GBTX (GBTxEMU) has been developed. The GBTxEMU may be implemented in cheap FPGAs, including Artix-7, and enables creating multichannel data acquisition chains based on the same front-end ASICs (SMX2 developed at AGH) as the one used in CBM. The GBTxEMU may work with the DPB boards developed for CBM, but a dedicated, price-optimized solution is under development.