Generic FPGA-Based Platform for Distributed IO in Proton Therapy Patient Safety Interlock System

At the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Switzerland, cancer patients are treated with protons. Proton therapy at PSI has a long history and started in the 1980s. More than 30 years later, a new gantry has recently been installed in the existing facility. This new machine has been delivered by an industry partner. A big challenge is the integration of the vendor’s safety system into the existing PSI environment. Different interface standards and the complexity of the system made it necessary to find a technical solution connecting an industry system to the existing PSI infrastructure. A novel very flexible distributed IO system based on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology was developed, supporting many different IO interface standards and high-speed communication links connecting the device to a PSI standard versa module eurocard-bus input output controller. This paper summarizes the features of the hardware technology, the FPGA framework with its high-speed communication link protocol, and presents our first measurement results.