Louis Costrell

CAMAC Instrumentation System - Introduction and General Description

The CAMAC instrumentation system developed by the ESONE Committee of European laboratories has been endorsed by the U. S. AEC NIM Committee as a dataway system complementary to the NIM (Nuclear Instrument Module) system. CAMAC is described in a general way in this introductory paper which is followed by papers that discuss the system in greater detail. This paper is an updated version of the introductory paper that appeared in the April 1971 IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science.

FASTBUS for Data Acquisition and Control

FASTBUS is a standardized modular data-bus system for data acquisition, data processing and control applications. It is the result of an interlaboratory development undertaken to meet the needs of the high energy physics community. However, the versatility, speed and addressing capability of FASTBUS make it attractive for many other types of application. A FASTBUS system consists of bus Segments which operate independently but dynamically link together as needed for operation passing. This parallel processing feature accounts to a great extent for the high throughput of FASTBUS in multisegment systems. Master modules compete for single or multiple Segment Control through a bus arbitration scheme using assigned priorities. Logical, geographical, secondary and broadcast addressing methods are used to access either data space or control and status register space. Features include block transfers, a sparse data scan and interrupts.

Highways for CAMAC Systems - A Brief Introduction

The interconnection between CAMAC crates and between the crates and a computer is called the CAMAC highway. The purpose of this paper is to present a brief summary of CAMAC highway configurations to put in perspective the highway papers that follow and to serve as a starting point for the panel discussion on CAMAC highways.

FASTBUS for the Particle Accelerator Laboratories

The FASTBUS modular high speed data acquisition and control system for high energy physics and other applications was described by Costrell and Dawson at the 1983 Particle Accelerator Conference. Both the specification and the implementation of this interlaboratory development have progressed considerably since that time. Because of its many attractive features, FASTBUS is currently in use in several major nuclear and high energy physics laboratories and is also finding application in other areas. The initial impetus for the development of FASTBUS came from the high energy physics community, since demands placed upon data acquisition systems by experiments in high energy physics were clearly beyond the capability of existing systems. The experiments being planned involved data rates much higher than had previously been encountered and total events were increasing because of improved accelerator technology. These were accompanied by order-of-magnitude increases in the size and complexity of the associated detectors and particularly in the number of detector outputs that had to be expeditiously viewed and processed by the electronics. To meet this need for an extremely fast and versatile system, an interlaboratory effort was launched, resulting in the FASTBUS system.

CAMAC: A Review and Status Report

CAMAC is a modular instrumentation system for transmission of digital data between instruments and between instruments and computers and computer peripherals. The system is described in a general way and the history of the CAMAC development, its expanding utilization in various fields and its current status are discussed. This is an introductory paper delivered at the 1972 Nuclear Science Symposium and is followed by papers that discuss CAMAC in greater detail.

What's new with FASTBUS and what's it done in the particle accelerator laboratories

Implementations of FASTBUS have been made in accelerator laboratories worldwide, resulting in clarifications, modifications and extensions of the specifications. Of tremendous benefit to users have been FASTBUS Standard Routines. The availability of such standard software is unique for high-speed bus systems and resulted from the involvement of hardware and software specialists in all aspects of the development. FASTBUS is the highest-performance instrumentation and data acquisition bus in existence and its development was essential to handle the outputs of detectors used with high-energy accelerators now in operation. It has been an important factor in experiments, including the Z/sup 0/ measurements at CERN, Fermilab, and SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center). Also among numerous FASTBUS implementations are those for TPC (TOPAZ Time Projection) systems at KEK (Japan National Laboratory for High Energy Physics) and BNL (Brookhaven National Laboratory).<<ETX>>