CERN Trajectory Measurement System (TMS)

This web site is for project information on the design, construction and support of the trajectory measurement system for the CERN Proton Synchrotron and Proton Synchrotron Booster machines. The FPGA based system on the PS consists of 120 analogue signal acquisition channels, followed by FPGA based digital signal processing to derive the positions of the particle bunches undergoing acceleration in the CERN synchrotron.

The system continuously samples the 120 Analogue channels at 125MHz, 14 bits and processes this data in real-time to determine information on the position of particle bunches as they orbit at around 437kHz. The system captures and processes 15 billion samples per second. Multiple Xilinx Vertex 4 FPGA's are employed in a modular system to capture and process the data. The system is controlled over a Gigabit Ethernet network from which portions of the resulting data can be accessed. System Overview