LOW COST FFT SCOPE USING LABVIEW, CRIO AND FPGA

At CERN, many digitizers and scopes are starting to age and should be replaced. Much of the equipment is custom made or not available on the market anymore. Replacing this equipment with the equivalent of today would either be time consuming or expensive. In this paper we look at the pros and cons of using Commercial Of The Shelf (COTS) systems like National Instruments (NI) Compact-RIO (cRIO) and NI PCI eXtensions for Instrumentation (NI-PXIe) and their Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) capabilities as flexible instruments, replacing costly spectrum analysers and older scopes. We add some insight on what had to be done to integrate and deploy the equipment in the unique CERN infrastructure and the added value of having a fully customizable platform, that makes it possible to stream, store and align the data without any additional equipment.