Front-end DAQ strategy and implementation for the KLOE-2 experiment

A new front-end data acquisition (DAQ) system has been conceived for the data collection of the new detectors which will be installed by the KLOE2 collaboration. This system consists of a general purpose FPGA based DAQ module and a VME board hosting up to 16 optical links. The DAQ module has been built around a Virtex-4 FPGA and it is able to acquire up to 1024 different channels distributed over 16 front-end slave cards. Each module is a general interface board (GIB) which performs also first level data concentration tasks. The GIB has an optical interface, a RS-232, an USB and a Gigabit Ethernet Interface. The optical interface will be used for DAQ purposes while the Gigabit Ethernet interface for monitoring tasks and debug. Two new detectors exploit this strategy to collect data. Optical links are used to deliver data to the VME board which performs data concentration tasks. The return optical link from the board to the GIB is used to initialize the front-end cards. The VME interface of the module implements the VME 2eSST protocol in order to sustain a peak data rate of up to 320 MB/s. At the moment the system is working at the Frascati National Laboratory (LNF).