Readout Card RevB to RevE changes
From MCEWiki
- Lower power
- Rev. E cards consume about 13.4W while Rev. B cards consume about 25W. This is mainly due to using a serial 8 in 1 ADC along with a Stratix III FPGA.
- Preamp chain
- The noise bandwidth of the preamp is adjusted to about 2MHz in Rev. E while it was about 6.6MHz in Rev. B cards. See [[ ]]
- Minimum Vcore
- The minimum voltage level for Vcore is 3V for Rev. E cards while it was 2.5V for Rev. B cards.
- 8 in 1 serial ADC
- An 8-channel 14-bit 50MS/s serial ADC (AD9252BCPZ-50) is used in Rev. F cards while a single channel 14-bit 50MS/s parallel ADC (AD6644AST) is used in Rev. D cards. The serial ADC accounts for most of the power saving.
- Stratix III series FPGA
- EP3SE50
- A pin compatible bigger FPGA with more resources, i.e., memory, DSP multipliers, is used in Rev. E as oppose to Stratix I series FPGA in Rev. B.
- FPGA configuration Device
- A serial configuration device (EPCS64) is used in Rev. E compare to a parallel configuration device (EPC16) in Rev. B. This accounts to some power savings.
- A *.jic file is needed to load permanent firmware on Rev. E cards as oppose to *.pof files for Rev. B cards.
- SEU tolerance
- The Stratix III FPGA in Rev. E has a CRC_ERROR pin that can be used to reconfigure the FPGA in case of an SEU hit on the FPGA configuration bits. This is not available on Rev. D. The option needs to yet be supported in firmware and software.
