LogAmp electronics and Optical Transmission for the new SPS Beam Position Measurement System

A new front-end board is under development for the CERN SPS Multi ORbit Position System (MOPOS). Based on logarithmic amplifiers, it measures the beam position over a large dynamic range of beam intensities and resolves the multi-batch structure of the SPS beams. Analogue data are digitized at 10 MS/s, packed in frames by an FPGA and on every turn sent to the readout board, via a 2.4 Gb/s optical transmission link. A first prototype has been successfully tested with several SPS beams. This paper presents an overall description of the system and its capabilities highlighted by the first beam measurements.