EEVblog #994 - CERN/Fermilab Particle Accelerator Boards!

I am going to have to profusely apologize to you Zimmerman if that's correct pronunciation from Germany this one has been sitting here for does it have a date on it I don't even want to read the date because it's going to be ridiculously embarrassing we cleaned up the love last week and this was I just had a whole bunch of stuff piled on because it was too big to fit on the mailbag shelf it's heavy too so it sort of sat down here but then other stuff got piled on top and it was forgotten about so sorry it's probably been here for like a year or something so I'm highly embarrassed but better late than never hi Dave I guess you got confused right now I do all my German viewers yes the package was mailed from Germany and I am German but I follow you from Sweden where I am now a lecturer at the University of Uppsala cool I've heard of that so these are dumpster diving stuff um thank you very much you aa couple of old chips and but these are big ah there yeah I got to take the front cover off but they're massive here's a better one here you go absolutely massively this save them from the dumpster whatever the heck they are they are all related to particle detection in medical applications interesting I'm too older RF chips or some research well I wonder if I can decap those and get them under the new way for our microscopes that'd be interesting so yeah I'm Poe just specialize been a kid particle detection stuff Wow interesting I probably how many of these would they have made not many like 20 or on so these gigantic boards are related to particle accelerator detection and stuff like that particle detection for medical applications and these were found in the dumpster at the University of Upsala and use a lecturer there and about a metric ton of stuff with throwing out at the said bird lab I would have to check the pronunciation of that but anyway Wow look at these things now you would think that these are memory right you would think that's classic like memory bank no no but these are motor roll I am MC 102 3-1 which is a jewel high-speed flip-flop like 220 Meg toggle frequency you what but why do you need an array of OHS okay some particle gate detection something like that perhaps and there's a Motorola r MC 10 h-11 6 is these are our line receivers so yeah they're obviously receiving stuff from the inputs over here and then are doing some legend or something like that look at this I think I got a lifetime supply of ad71 to precision jewel op amps and they sock it in so you'd most definitely salvaged these from Borla obviously can't do anything with a board you know it's a custom absolutely custom designed application but you know yeah wind everything socketed like this you still were these puppies all seven forearm you know ALS logic and stuff like that there's the main processor TRW water basically i'm so i got no idea but yeah this would have obviously been custom designed for this particle detector application that they need to or don't know how many of these did they make 10 boards for a rack for some experiment or something like that perhaps but yeah Wow if you're curious to see what's on the front not much okay we have something to do with soon so yeah it's that the I don't know it like old styled experiment stuff at does CERN serial number 25 so as I said they don't make many of these things and they're all custom and this is an ad MUX to do what wow this is really old-school we've got a cop 402 process with an E with no sticker other windows all the electrons are definitely fallen out of that puppy so yes I like it little process old-school cop processor with all this once again with all this detection stuff on the front end here our fancy pantsy surface mount ah modern rubbish and this is another add marks board look at this Wow all the chips traditionally laid out in your you know and completely lined up a row configuration like this this is where you would use an auto router on something like this you know it's all digital stuff so it's probably not hugely high-speed except for like the front end stuff and things like that so you'd let the auto router rip on such a thing and this would be a four layer board obviously you know power and ground rails in there and then all your traces on the top would all run horizontal or vertical basically this one looks like it's running horizontal and then all the ones on the other side let me flip it over see if I'm telling the truth yes I am telling the truth they all run vertically look at that so yep that's classic case for a typical arm XY auto router to just you know you just let that rip you wouldn't do it by hand so that's a classic example of that I love the little buds down here look at there stay away and I yeah we need to trim something I look it goes oh boys go all the way over here we need to trim something but we want to get it close to the front maybe where we can get a screwdriver through and adjust it so they've added that on it's pretty how you're doing but they did the business once again you didn't you know you couldn't Reese pin this board you would just hack things together you need to get the experiment working and it looks like they've done somebody's you know done service fancy surface mount stuff for some input front end on this thing so you know we could go in all day and analyze the chips on this puppy but yep and then it all goes into the digital section of course and well what processes that running nothing I think it's just ties in I mean we've got a massive bus system on the back here it's just absolutely enormous we worked Wow all the way with LBJ now this one's really interesting for two reasons one is that looks like it's made by Lacroix so maybe they were are commissioned to do some sort of custom interface but guess who for US government property all know Uncle Sam's going to knock down the door I'm going to be swatted and they're going to want their gear back from the first comes from the Fermi National Accelerator lab US government property hmm anyway it was in the dumpster once it hits a dumpster it's fair game what on earth is a fast bus segment manager interface hmm it's a Lacroix 1821 sm1 hmm Oh a SMI and it's got a second board on there as well it looks like just all low ping count dip packages and all labeled so there's no processor under there so it obviously goes into some sort of bus system at the back now I've actually heard of the fast bus system before but I've never really looked into it and it's an I Triple E standard I Triple E 960 computer bus stand originally intended to replace Quebec in high speed low scaled data acquisition and to create modular electronics in in particular data acquisition for particle detectives that's exactly what we've got here and these are crate based systems these are actually vme is one of them fast bus chemic which fast bus replaced and an M I've never don't think I've ever heard of once again specifically I designed more towards particle accelerators so it's a 19-inch rack mount system with all these cards and blade processes that plug into this thing so obviously la croix been you know a data acquisition specialist we know how we can make a ton of money designing these plug-in systems I might have even said even been a being commissioned by the universities the particle detector modest actually design these are front end cards and things like that so there you go fast bus learn something new every day look at this this would have been a dumpster-diving dream back in the day when you know their chips were expensive and hard to get everything socketed like you would just fill your junk bin with all sorts of logic and stuff yes look like I can't read those on the LCD screen or the camcorder here but you just rip them all out whack them in your junk bin and Bob's your uncle beautiful these boards would have cost an absolute fortune to design and manufacture and then for some custom purpose and then they got tossed out that's where these physics experiments cost billions of dollars you know it's somebody some groups got a design and engineer and build these things you know ten of these boards for some experiment to detect something I don't know fantastic I have no idea what an SF diem is but anyone Bueller Bueller Bueller it looks like we have a matching Lacroix card the 1881 a DC card so it's a multi-channel he obviously stands for something hmm this heat was okay in 2000 apparently property of Uncle Sam and these are all our properties there you get property of the US government come and get me these are all our fast bus so this is a 64 channel ADC card obviously this is all the digital interface at the back and all the analog gas stuff at the front designed for custom physics experiments like this you know it's no use to your average engineer he just wants a multi channel oscilloscope these are designed for real big high-end system stuffs and they would have cost a boy like how I undo the screws and they just slide and lift off and let's have a look inside this heat is heap I love that Xilinx FPGA of ACP all DS and custom Lacroix chip is in here ooh there they be custom Lacroix adc's I'll see if I can find some data on those Lacroix jobs but yeah it wouldn't be hopeful anyway this is beautiful there's the there's the front end of this thing and you know it's not designed to be an oscilloscope or anything he also is probably just one voltage level front-end or something like that since all the digital part that interfaces to the bus we've got some power supply stuff going up here but yeah like lots of our test interfaces and stuff like that they are of course that better be for our dog that'd be for programming and debugging for sure and sure enough you can find data on this thing check it out Lacroix Corporation has recently announced the new time to digital converter integrated circuit design for elementary particle and heavy ion physics experiences TVC the Lacroix MTD one three two combines high-density eight channels per monolithic chip low-power sixty milliwatts per channel on high resolution less than one nanosecond that's right a single integrated circuit it's been designed with drift chamber and time projection chamber applications in mind is the natural next step in the 20-year old long evolution of Lucroy time digital digitizers for particle physics there you go there's a go-to solution fantastic and worse than 167 megahertz clock on the thing gray code scaler and all the goodness all linking these down below so the one we just looked at was an I Triple E paper um this one's actually in a book which is on Google Books they just had this one page you know how they skip you know a bunch of pages in there at least had this one once again it talks about this four high multiplicity forward spectrometer drift chamber readout and all sorts a wonderful experiment you can do with this thing sub nanosecond timing this high resolution multi bit TDC can digitize both leading and trailing edges of pulses so you know designed for like detectors as the particles go past in the accelerator boom-boom-boom you know it basically times the difference between one central next I would be guessing and this article actually talks about using this chip in the superconducting supercollider which was my hand in 1993 after building nothing like 23 kilometres of tunnels for the damn thing and spending other day how many billions of dollars on it oops don't mention the SSC I swear you could almost frame this although it's kind of I'm sort of almost framed already but put in a fancy frame and hang this up in some hipster cafe and you could probably sell this thing for a thousand bucks azar so I'm going to buy it with a cafe latte yep it's from Uppsala University alright the said Berg laboratory that area pronounced it started almost Swedish feels pretty good too you ready hurry hurry dude now this is a real interesting board um it is look at users actual lockroy chips over here but it wasn't a badger Lacroix and it seems different to the others so I'm not sure like did they make a one-off for them and look advanced analog ADC they've got some specific like custom ADC module there so I'm not sure what's going on but you like like the engineering that's gone into this just for this experiment or to do some you know research application or something incredible oh no it's actually Lacroix it's an 1880s but like why they're using someone else's ADC I don't know maybe in the USA once again dumpster divers dream look at this unnecessary conductor LHW three-two's I think they're discontinued high speed high voltage op amps and we're gonna SS socketed we can just lift those out winner winner chicken dinner and last but not least another Lacroix job here once again - Lacroix our custom 1/6 eye links are CP or D or sub description once again few mud wires on here look at that one well look at that it's feeding back on itself and most little hack over here why is it so long do they have to add some extra delay maybe to make it so long hmm whatever is going on in here it's working at 125 Meg anyway thankfully data provided that's a Lacroix 1876 RFC made by Uncle Sam himself so thank you very much you for saving these classic boards from the dumpster look like incredible fine for anyone dumpster diving like to salvage parts and things like that and you know these things are really hard to come by you basically have to work at one of these physics labs one of these particle accelerators as you does and sure enough these things are well they date from the 1990s I think most of there might have been one from the 80s or something but yeah the experiments all finished that money's all spent done and dusted or results are being collected or they've upgraded the systems or whatever and they toss out these not any tracks they don't need them anymore tossed out all the cards and everything else and there would have been computers to go along with it probably and and you know tons of other cards as you said I think there was like a couple of metric tons of stuff that they actually tossed in the dumpsters so real shame but thankfully we got to take a look at these it's not every day you get your hands on one of these things they don't make many of these and if anyone knows how much these things would have cost back in the day please let us know in the comments because we'd love to find out so I hope you enjoyed that look at some classic particle accelerator custom fast bus stuff from Lacroix awesome if you liked it please give it a big thumbs up and as always discuss it down below catch you next time you

Channel: EEVblog

Views: 129,170

Rating: 4.9361882 out of 5

Keywords: eevblog, video, cern, fermilab, particle accelerator, pcb, lecroy, fastbus, vma, rack, adc, detection, particle, Superconducting Super Collider, modular crate electronics

Id: 0DmzxUM-9v0

Length: 17min 42sec (1062 seconds)

Published: Tue May 16 2017