FERS-5200 Concentrators

FERS Data Concentrators are dedicated collector boards designed to interface and aggregate data from multiple A520x front-end units, forming a distributed and easily scalable readout architecture. Each A520x board is a compact module featuring 32 or 64 readout channels with integrated Front-End electronics, A/D converters, trigger logic, synchronization, local memory, and data interface. 

The FERS platform is flexible and modular: by maintaining a common readout and control infrastructure — including a unified user interface — different front-end designs can be developed to match a wide range of detector technologies. Most front-ends are based on ASIC chips, which allow for compact, low-power, and cost-effective multi-channel integration. ASICs may include analog signal chains (preamplifier, shaper, peak detector, discriminator), or fast Flash ADCs (1 GS/s or more) capable of waveform digitization and digital processing for timing, energy, and pulse shape extraction. 

Each FERS unit can also operate in standalone mode, connected directly to a PC via USB 2.0 or 10/100T Ethernet. This configuration offers a convenient and affordable solution for ASIC evaluation. Once validated, the system can be scaled up to thousands of channels by connecting multiple FERS units into a tree topology, where the optical TDlink serves as the single physical connection handling data readout, slow control, and timing synchronization. 

Two Concentrator models are available:

• DT5216 – features 1 optical link, supporting up to 8 A520x units in daisy chain.

• DT5215 – features 8 optical links, supporting up to 64 A520x units in total.

Each A520x board may host up to 128 channels, allowing a DT5215 to manage up to 8192 channels from a single board. 

Both DT5215 and DT5216 integrate a Linux-based Single Board Computer that handles event building and data aggregation based on timestamp and/or trigger ID from each FERS unit. The resulting data packets are sorted, merged, temporarily stored in local memory, and then transmitted to the host computer. DT5215 offers both 1 Gb Ethernet and USB 3.0 connectivity (10 GbE Coming Soon), while DT5216 is equipped with a USB 3.0 interface only. 

Users can also deploy custom data processing or reduction algorithms directly onto the embedded CPU for enhanced flexibility. 

One computer, one Concentrator, thousands of channels

FERS-5200 is a scalable system: the same FERS unit can be used standalone during the prototyping phase, and later connected in a network tree to build a full-scale experiment — all while keeping the same hardware and interface. 

The key to this scalability is the optical TDlink, which combines data transmission, slow control, and synchronization in a single connection. 

The DT5215 concentrator board features 8 optical links, each connecting up to 16 FERS units in daisy chain. In the case of the A5203 unit for SiPM readout, this results in up to 8192 channels managed by a single DT5215 board. 

For applications requiring fewer channels, the DT5216 offers a compact and cost-effective alternative, with a single optical link supporting up to 8 FERS units. 

Additional scalability is possible by synchronizing multiple Concentrator boards (DT5215 only), allowing the system to grow with your experiment’s needs.