PXI & EPICS

[Al-Adwan Ahed <ahed.aladwan@psi.ch>]

Hi All,

 

At the mXAS beamline at the Swiss Light Source we plane to use an X-Ray DSP Multi Channel Analyzer based on XIA (X-ray Instrumentation Association) DXP. This analyzer is provided on an 3U Euro Card from that is designed to run on a National Instrument PXI crate.

 

We plan to port both the DXP and MCA records (device support) initially developed by Mark Rivers to run on the carte Windows Controller (we are still discussing developing the low level drivers to run on a Linux box). The Windows drivers are provided by the company.

 

It is clear that XIA has suggested this solution based on our requirements of high throughput and on the fly data acquisition (ping-pong memory mode), our detector has 32 elements.

 

Even though the module is designed to run on a PXI crate, it is still compatible with a compact PCI system, but we lose some additional important features like synchronization and bus logic between modules.

 

My question is did any body from the EPICS community worked before with either a PXI or cPCI crates? What are their experiences with these systems?

 

Best regards,

Ahed Aladwan   SLS / Paul Scherrer Institute      

WSLA / 208      CH-5232 Villigen PSI   +41 56 310 4594

www.psi.ch        http://people.web.psi.ch/adwan/