A Gigabit Ethernet link for an FPGA based Beam Loss Measurement System

A new Beam Loss Monitoring (BLM) system is under development at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) within the LHC Injector Upgrade (LIU) project. The multi-channel system will have the ability to measure beam losses from various types of detectors with high precision and wide dynamic range. Several modes of data acquisition are supported. The data rate in the singlechannel mode is 16 Mbps and in the multi-channel mode 128 Mbps. The Gigabit Ethernet link is implemented in an FPGA, which allows both a high throughput and a quick validation of the digital data processing algorithms using standard PCs in the initial stages of the development. Both TCP and UDP protocols were explored. The implementation of the Ethernet link is flexible and proved to be highly reliable, leading to its planned use in other measurement systems developed at CERN. The implementation details of the Ethernet link and the results achieved will be described in this paper.