Modular Hardware for the Recording and Preliminary Digital Processing of Data from Multiwire Proportional Chambers

Abstract

The modular hardware is described that provides the recording and preliminary digital processing of coordinate data from multiwire proportional chambers operating with a large multiplicity of particles in high-intensity beams (up to 10⁶ particle/s per wire) of the 70-GeV accelerator from the Institute of High-Energy Physics. The digital section of the hardware (64-channel recording modules and controllers) is mounted in electronics racks located far from on-chamber preamplifiers–shapers of signals arriving from the multiwire proportional chamber. To match with the trigger signal, the hardware uses two signal delay stages (fixed cable and tunable cyclic-memory-based digital stages). The hardware searches for the useful data, processes it by the binary encoding to compress data arrays and optimize data formats before inputting into a computer.