Front-end readout system for PHENIX RICH

Abstract A front-end readout system with a custom backplane and custom circuit modules has been developed for the RICH subsystem of the PHENIX experiment. The design specifications and test results of the backplane and the modules are presented in this paper. In the module design, flexibility for modification is maximized through the use of Complex Programmable Logic Devices. In the backplane design, a source-synchronous bus architecture is adopted for the data and control bus. The transfer speed of the backplane has reached 640 Mbyte/s with a 128-bit data bus. Total transaction time is estimated to be less than 30 μs per event when this system is used in the experiment. This result indicates that the performance satisfies the data-rate requirement of the PHENIX experiment.