A High speed Fastbus VME data acquisition system for the CERN NA36 experiment

Abstract A high speed data acquisition system was used to record events from sulphur-nucleus collisions at 200 GeV/ c per nucleon at the CERN NA36 experiment. The system was designed to accept up to 12 Mbytes of raw data per beam spill. A multicrate Fastbus-CAMAC system was used to acquire the data during the beam spill and thereafter event-building and transfer to IBM 3480 cartridges were accomplished by means of two processors in a VME crate which processed data between spills. Communication between Fastbus and VME crates was provided by a fast link developed at CERN.