Options for Next Generation Digital Acquisition Systems

Digital acquisition system designers have an always increasing number of options in terms of bus standards and digital signal processing hardware among which to choose. This allows for high flexibility but also opens the door to a proliferation of different architectures, potentially limiting the reusability and the design synergies among the various instrumentation groups. This contribution illustrates the design trends in some of the major institutes around the world with design examples including VME, PCI and TCA based modular systems using AMC and/or FMC mezzanines. Some examples of FPGA design practices aimed at increasing reusability of code will be mentioned together with some of the tools already available to designers to improve the information exchange and collaboration, like the Open Hardware Repository project.