SoC Data Readout Method for CBM-TOF Super Module Quality Evaluation

Several Multi-Gap Resistive Plate Chambers (MRPCs) was used to construct a Time of Flight (TOF) system in the Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment. According to the requirements of the CBM experiment, the CBM-TOF wall is composed of 6 different types of super module. Each module contains five MRPC detectors, providing 320 electronic channels with data rates up to 6 Gbps for a single module. To evaluate the quality of CBM-TOF super module, in this paper, a data readout module based on Gigabit Ethernet technology was developed. The readout module accepts digitized time data from the front-end electronics using Altera SoC FPGAs and sends the data to the DAQ software in parallel via Gigabit Ethernet. Laboratory test results show that the overall data transfer rate of a single data transmission path can reach up to 550 Mbps, which can be used for CBM-TOF Super Module quality evaluation.