The SLAC Common-Platform Firmware for High-Performance Systems
Till Straumann, Richard O. Claus, John M. D'Ewart, J. Frisch, G. Haller, Ryan T. Herbst, Hong, Bo, Uro Legat, Lili Ma, Jeff Olsen, Benjamin A. Reese, Larry L. Ruckman, L. Sapozhnikov, Stephen E. P. Smith, D. Van Winkle, Jesus Vásquez, Matthew Weaver, Ernest Williams, Chengcheng Xu, Young, Andrew · JACOW · 2018
LCLS-II's high beam rate of almost 1MHz and the requirement that several "high-performance" systems (such as MPS, BPM, LLRF, timing etc.) shall resolve individual bunches precludes the use of a traditional software based control system but requires many core services to be implemented in FPGA logic. SLAC has created a comprehensive open-source firmware framework which implements many commonly used blocks (e.g., timing, globally-synchronized fast data buffers, MPS, diagnostic data capture), libraries (Ethernet protocol stack, AXI interconnect, FIFOs, memory etc.) and interfaces (e.g., for timing, diagnostic data etc.) thus providing a versatile platform on top of which powerful high-performance systems can be built and rapidly integrated.