Design of a Common High-Performance Data Acquisition System for Physics Experiments at HIAF

In this article, a common high-performance data acquisition (DAQ) system for High Intensity heavy-ion Accelerator Facility (HIAF) centered with a new common data acquisition unit (CDAU) is introduced. The system includes eight fiber optic transmission channels connected to front-end (FE) electronics, delivering data bandwidth up to 10 Gbps per channel, along with highly scalable FPGA mezzanine card (FMC) and general-purpose input/output (GPlO) interfaces. Moreover, a peripheral component interconnect Express $2.0\times 8$ protocol (bandwidth up to 40 Gbps) is implemented to facilitate data exchange with the data center. Laboratory characterization revealed that the bit error rate (BER) of the fiber optic transmission channel is relatively low, at $5.8\times 10{^{-16}}$ at a 10-Gbps transmission rate. In addition, the read/write rates of the PCI Express (PCIe) interface demonstrated stability, with the read speed consistently maintained at 3400 MB/s and an error rate as low as $2.09\times 10{^{-15}}$ , while the write speed is stable at 3420 MB/s, with an error rate reaching $2.14\times 10{^{-15}}$ . Subsequent experiments involved measuring 137Cs radiation source and cosmic ray spectra using various scintillator detectors, achieving the energy resolution of 1.12% and 21.34%. Overall, the DAQ system proved robust and stable in practical scenarios in HIAF. This article examines the DAQ system’s design and performance.