Controlling electronics boards with PVSS

This paper addresses several aspects of implementing a control system for electronics boards in order to perform remote Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) programming, hardware configuration, register control, and monitoring, as well as interfacing it to an expert system. The paper presents an implementation, using the Distributed Information Management (DIM) package and the industrial SCADA system PVSS II from ETM, in which the access mechanisms to the board resources are completely generic and in which the device prescription and the handling of mapping between functional parameters and physical registers follow a common structure independent of the board type. The control system also incorporates mechanisms by which it may be controlled from a finite state machine based expert system. Finally the paper suggests an improvement in which the mapping between logical parameters and physical registers is represented by descriptors in the device description such that the translation can be handled by a common method. The implementation has been applied to build a local run control for the Timing and Fast Control (TFC) system of the LHCb experiment at CERN. It has been in use during the entire prototyping of the TFC system and is now installed centrally at CERN for the LHCb sub-detector tests.