Modular crate electronics: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 01:22, 2 October 2020

Revision as of 14:21, 5 October 2020

Line 10:

There are number of types of modular crate electronic systems used on particle physics experiments.

=== RENATRAN ===

The very first standard for crate electronics was Renatran, which itself was derived from the Esone Standard published in 1964.<ref>{{cite web|title=Renatran Basic Functional Units|url=https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/4324413|publisher=IEEE|accessdate=05 October 2020}}</ref> This standard was in use mainly in France in nuclear research.

The Renatran system was comprised of a 5U rackable crate that could accept up to 8 single-width or up to 4 double width plug-in units, with the backplane supplying several power rails, as well as serial and parallel communications between modules, and between the rack and external equipment such as printers and computers.

Each plug-in units had the dials, indicators and connectors on the front, and a single screw-mated 24 pin connector (Souriau 8196-17, no longer produced) on the rear to connect to the back-plane. Certain units had additional connectors on the rear, either doubled from the front panel for a more permanent installation, or extra ports for specific purposes, such as daisy chaining counting modules or linking level comparators together. A plug-in unit generally accomplished a single task, such as giving out a clock signal, inverting signal polarity, attenuating or amplifying signals, and more.

=== NIM ===

The earliestsimplest and simplestone of the earliest crate module standard is the [[Nuclear Instrumentation Module|NIM (Nuclear Instrumentation Module)]] standard. A NIM crate only has power on the backplane, there is no data bus or data connectors. The NIM backplane connector is an irregular arrangement of individual pins into sockets in the crate. NIM modules typically have multiple single logic blocks on the front with both inputs and outputs on the front panel. A typical NIM module might be, say, four discriminators on the front panel, or three AND gates. NIM modules can be [[hot swap]]ped, since there are no data connectors at the back.

=== CAMAC ===