Development of a Beam Loss Measurement System with Gigabit Ethernet Readout at CERN

The aim of the BLM Dual Polarity module under development at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) is to measure and digitise with high precision the current produced by several types of beam loss detectors. In its default configuration, it is expected to provide data to the processing electronics through two point-to-point connections with bidirectional multi-gigabit optical links. For the development phases as well as later serving as a standalone measurement system, its reconfigurable FPGA device is exploited to provide a soft-core CPU with a custom made server. This server, running on the CPU, will expose through the Gigabit Ethernet connection and the TCP/IP protocol different types of data in the network. In this paper the development of the system and of the communication protocol is explored as well as the accompanying client ap- plication that is realised with the purpose of commanding, collecting storing and viewing the different types of data.