"When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ballpoint pens would not work in zero gravity. To combat the problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion to develop a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to 300 C. The Russians used a pencil." Overview
In LHCb small
(credit-card size) embedded PCs will be used to provide the necessary local
intelligence on an electronics board. They are connected to the central ECS
via a conventional Ethernet and allow
accessing the various components of the board. The core of this Credit-Card PC (CC-PC for short) is
a SM586PC smartModule produced by Digital-Logic, Inc. This module comprises
a PC-on-a-chip, the ZFx86, an Ethernet interface, and a Flash RAM . It can
run any standard PC operating system.
To isolate the specific pin-out of the CC-PC module from the board-design and in order to add interfaces, which are not provided by default like e.g. JTAG, a "glue-card" is used. The current and final version of the glue-card (v2.0) is designed by the Genoa electronics group. It provides a PLX 9030 local bus, 4 I2C and 3 JTAG interfaces. DocumentationZFx86 System-on-a-chip
Data Book rev 1.0C, the
core of the CC-PC from ZF Micro Devices Notes & Presentations"On-board PCs for interfacing front-end electronics",
presentation JCOP team meeting,
April, 2002 (pdf) Links
Credit-Card PC @ CERN Please send comments and suggestions to niko.neufeld@cern.ch. |
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The final glue-card is progressing well. More information at
the