The DSP-Carrier Board Used by the LEIR Low-Level RF System: User's Manual

A new digital technology to implement beam control systems was tested in the PS Booster in 2004 and 2005 and commissioned in LEIR in 2006. The technology is based upon RF custom hardware that heavily exploits Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) processing power. This architecture is extremely flexible in that it relies on a DSP-carrier board hosting one DSP and carrying different daughtercards. The LEIR beam control system deploys three DSP-carrier boards, which inter-communicate and exchange data continuously for the implementation of the various beam control loops. This user's manual for the DSP-carrier board, release 1.0 (EDA-00990-V1), was written in 2004 and has been used by CERN and BNL developers since then. It describes the DSP-carrier board hardware, user settings and FPGA software; hints on the DSP code used with the board are also given. An additional VME board, called Rear Transition Module, is described because it acts as a DSP-carrier board extension.