EPICS device support for an ATCA CDAQ Board with hot-plug capabilities

• Published in: Fusion engineering and design 2017-11, Vol.123, p.732-736
• Main Authors: Santos, Bruno, Carvalho, Paulo F., Batista, Antonio J.N., Correia, Miguel, Rodrigues, A.P., Carvalho, Bernardo B., Sousa, Jorge, Combo, Álvaro M., Cruz, Nuno, Correia, Carlos M.B.A., Gonçalves, Bruno
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Applications programs; ATCA; Control equipment; Control systems; Data acquisition; Data collection; Digital signal processing; EPICS; Field programmable gate arrays; Fusion; Hot-plug; Industrial electronics; ITER; Laboratory equipment; Nuclear fusion; Nuclear physics; Nuclear power plants; Open source software; Operating systems; Redundancy; Studies
• ISSN: 0920-3796; 1873-7196
• DOI: 10.1016/j.fusengdes.2017.03.174

•The integration of the hot-plug features inside EPICS has done successfully.•The solution allows the user to configure an entire system using the EPICS DB and st.cmd files.•This architecture supports system running with several boards at the same time.•The number of boards does not affect the stability of the system.•The GUI is automatically updated when a board is physically changed. The Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA) standard defines a high performance technical solution that meets the requirements for fast controllers on large-scale physics experiments like ITER. This platform provides high throughput, scalability and features for high availability such as redundancy and intelligent platform management which are essential for steady state experiments. An ATCA Control and Data Acquisition (CDAQ) demonstration system was developed for the ITER Fast Plant System Controller (FPSC) project, which is already available in the ITER Catalog. This system comprises a board with 48 galvanic isolated analog and/or digital channels configurable as input or output with digital signal processing capabilities performed by a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and an ATCA carrier. The Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) is a set of open source software tools, libraries and applications used worldwide to create distributed soft real-time control systems for scientific instruments. To provide the hardware integration on the EPICS environment, a device support has been developed as a software layer, which is comparable to the abstraction layer provided by the device driver on the Operating Systems. This paper presents the implementation and test of an EPICS Device Support for the ATCA CDAQ Board that comprises templates for easy configuration of the entire system. This solution also allows simultaneous and independent acquisition by each board, providing hot-plug features which support insertion and removal of boards while keeping other modules and the overall system running. Operation with several boards and different versions of Linux operating system was performed and the results are presented.