Low-level software for the pentek 6510 digital receiver board applied to the new AD beam measurement system

The new beam measurement system for the CERN Antiproton Decelerator heavily relies on a Pentek 6510 Digital Receiver (DRX) board. The new system goal is to extract beam parameters from pickup signals. Its digital implementation allows for higher precision, easier management of the hardware as well as modification and improvement with no hardware change. In this scheme, this innovative VME DRX board is responsible for parallel data acquisition, independent digital down conversion and processing of up to 4 digitised inputs. The in-house- developed low-level code (LLC), running on the board, takes care of several tasks, such as interfacing with the Real Time Task (RTT), data processing and board managing. The RTT runs on a PowerPC VME board and controls the DRX board as a master. The LLC is a state machine developed in C and Assembler, which services several interrupts and performs the FFT of complex input data. The DRX low-level system developed is highly modular and easily adaptable to other processing scenarios. In fact it implements a multi-window spectrum analyser with additional customised data processing capabilities. After a thorough description of the DRX board, a detailed account of the accompanying software is given, together with an overview of the development environment used.