Hello Goetz,

 

At PSI we are running the SLS, HIPA, ProScan and the SwissFEL on VME.

 

For the SwissFEL we are using the IFC1210 board from IOxOS, which is a FMC carrier board with a Virtex-6 FPGA and a P2020 PowerPC . This was more or less a development just for our project, but it is available for purchase. Here, we have developed a full environment of FMCs and RTMs for DACs, ADCs and GPIOs. We use a custom built Linux as Operating System, but this also meant that we had to develop the VME bus Linux kernel drivers on our own (or rather pay for their development on our own). The EPICS drivers we obviously also had to develop ourselves.

 

This board is currently guaranteed to be available at least until 2030 and besides the SwissFEL we are also using it if we need an replacement in the other machines. Therefore, we are also developing a solution to replace our Hytec boards.

 

At the moment we are discussing how the successor should look like, but this is a project where first board versions would be available earliest at 2020 and deployment would start from 2023 onwards. Currently we are just starting with the evaluation phase. Since we have so many machines running on VME, it is pretty unlikely that we will get along without VME version of the successor board.

 

So if you want to take a closer look at our systems, feel free to contact me.

 

Cheers

Kristian