The SLAC Common-Platform Firmware for High-Performance Systems

LCLS-II's high beam rate of almost 1MHz and the requirement that several "high-performance" systems (such as MPS, BPM, LLRF, timing etc.) shall resolve individual bunches precludes the use of a traditional software based control system but requires many core services to be implemented in FPGA logic. SLAC has created a comprehensive open-source firmware framework which implements many commonly used blocks (e.g., timing, globally-synchronized fast data buffers, MPS, diagnostic data capture), libraries (Ethernet protocol stack, AXI interconnect, FIFOs, memory etc.) and interfaces (e.g., for timing, diagnostic data etc.) thus providing a versatile platform on top of which powerful high-performance systems can be built and rapidly integrated.