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ID Dateup Author Subject
  61   Mon Apr 5 17:57:41 2010 Heejong KimSimple example application to read a DRS evaluation board

Stefan Ritt wrote:

Several people asked for s simple application to guide them in writing their own application to read out a DRS board. Such an application has been added in software revions 2.1.1 and is attached to this message. This example program drs_exam.cpp written in C++ does the following necessary steps to access a DRS board:

  • Crate a "DRS" object and scan all USB devices
  • Display found DRS boards
  • Initialize the first found board and set the sampling frequency to 5 GSPS
  • Enable internal trigger on channel #1 with 250 mV threshold
  • Start acquisition and wait for a trigger
  • Read two waveforms (both time and amplitude)
  • Repeat this 10 times

I know that we are still missing a good documentation for the DRS API, but I have not yet found the time to do that. I hope the example program is enough for most people to start writing own programs. For Windows users (MS Visual C++ 8.0) there is a drs.sln project file, and for linux users there is a Makefile which can be used to compile this example program.

 

 Hi, Stefan,

drs_exam.cpp is working good to read-out one board.

Now I would like to read-out two boards at the same time using the same trigger( external or internal).

I'm trying to understand and modify the original code for control two board.

Meantime, it would be very appreciated if you give any tips for this.

Thanks,

Heejong

  62   Fri Apr 9 17:14:45 2010 Hao HuanBaseline Variation In Data

Hi Stefan,

    when I sample a constant input with the DRS 4 chip, there was a baseline variation showing up as a saw-tooth pattern which grows with the absolute value of the differential input. Do you think this is the kind of baseline variation mentioned in the evaluation board manual, i.e. coming from clock jitter in ADC sampling?

    Thanks a lot!

 

  63   Tue Apr 13 10:45:18 2010 lorenzo nerievaluation board used like a counter

Hi all



it is possible to use the evaluation board like a counter?



I'm interested in the arriving time of all self trigger event in to a channel.



the input signal are 2V TTL of 10 ns at 50ohm, and the time acquisition window is 1 second.




can someone help me?



thanks in advance,



Lorenzo

  64   Tue Apr 13 13:12:43 2010 Stefan Rittevaluation board used like a counter

lorenzo neri wrote:

Hi all

it is possible to use the evaluation board like a counter?

I'm interested in the arriving time of all self trigger event in to a channel.

the input signal are 2V TTL of 10 ns at 50ohm, and the time acquisition window is 1 second.

The evaluation board is as good or bad as an digital oscilloscope to work like a counter. At 1 GSPS, you have a window of one microsecond, which is certainly too short for your application. 

  65   Tue Apr 13 13:56:07 2010 Stefan RittBaseline Variation In Data

Hao Huan wrote:

Hi Stefan,

    when I sample a constant input with the DRS 4 chip, there was a baseline variation showing up as a saw-tooth pattern which grows with the absolute value of the differential input. Do you think this is the kind of baseline variation mentioned in the evaluation board manual, i.e. coming from clock jitter in ADC sampling?

    Thanks a lot!

 

Please post an oscilloscope screenshot here and I can tell you. 

  66   Tue Apr 13 14:15:16 2010 Stefan RittSimple example application to read a DRS evaluation board

Heejong Kim wrote:

Stefan Ritt wrote:

Several people asked for s simple application to guide them in writing their own application to read out a DRS board. Such an application has been added in software revions 2.1.1 and is attached to this message. This example program drs_exam.cpp written in C++ does the following necessary steps to access a DRS board:

  • Crate a "DRS" object and scan all USB devices
  • Display found DRS boards
  • Initialize the first found board and set the sampling frequency to 5 GSPS
  • Enable internal trigger on channel #1 with 250 mV threshold
  • Start acquisition and wait for a trigger
  • Read two waveforms (both time and amplitude)
  • Repeat this 10 times

I know that we are still missing a good documentation for the DRS API, but I have not yet found the time to do that. I hope the example program is enough for most people to start writing own programs. For Windows users (MS Visual C++ 8.0) there is a drs.sln project file, and for linux users there is a Makefile which can be used to compile this example program.

 

 Hi, Stefan,

drs_exam.cpp is working good to read-out one board.

Now I would like to read-out two boards at the same time using the same trigger( external or internal).

I'm trying to understand and modify the original code for control two board.

Meantime, it would be very appreciated if you give any tips for this.

Thanks,

Heejong

The evaluation boards are not really made for multi-board applications. What you have to do is to maintain an external trigger which synchronizes the boards. So you need:

- two boards connected to two USB ports

- an external flip-flop connected to the two trigger inputs of both boards

If a trigger is sent to the flip-flop, it sends a trigger to both evaluation boards. You poll on one of the boards to see if it has triggered (vis IsBusy()), then you read out both boards. Now you have to reset the external flip-flop somehow from the computer. If you have a CAMAC I/O board or some other means of sending a logical signal to it, that could do the job. From the software point, you get a "DRS" object upon initialization, which contains then two "DRSBoard" objects, over which you can iterate. Look at the "drscl" program from the distribution on how to do that.

  67   Wed Apr 14 16:34:28 2010 Stefan Rittversion 1.2 evaluation board with firmware 13279?

Heejong Kim wrote:
Hi, Stefan,

I found that my collaborator bought 2 older version of evaluation board before.
They are the version 1.2 in plastics case with firmware 13191.

Can I upgrade the firmware from 13191 to 13279?
I'm wondering if the older version of evaluation board is working with firmware 13279.

Thanks,
Heejong

I checked and there is no significant difference between the two revisions, so I would just leave it. 

  68   Thu Apr 15 13:48:40 2010 Stefan RittROFS Configuration

Hao Huan wrote:

Hi Stefan,

    according to the DRS4 datasheet, if we want an input range centered around U0, the ROFS should be 1.55V-U0. However when I read the codes of the evaluation board application, ROFS seems to be 1.6V-1.25*U0 where the coefficient 1.25 is said to come from sampling cell charge injection correction. Is it the right equation to use? What exactly does that charge injection correction mean?

    Thanks a lot.

 

1.55V-U0 is the theoretical values, but there are certain "dirt" effects like chip-to-chip variation and charge injection. The difference between various chips is easily 20-30mV, so there is not a single "correct" value. The formula 1.6V-1.25*U0 I developed for a special evaluation board, where it kind of worked better than the theoretical value, but I never made systematic studies. One should average over several chips and use some solid average there. Best is if you try both formulas and check what give you the better linearity.

  69   Sun May 2 18:36:14 2010 Ignacio Diéguez EstremeraDRS4 chip model

Hi all,

i'm an electronics engineering student at UCM (Madrid) working on my master's thesis within the CTA collaboration. I'm designing the readout electronics for the telescope's camera, and i'm focusing in using GAPDs instead of PMTs and using the domino chip for the sampling of the signal. I was wondering if there is a spice and/or RF model of the DRS4 chip available. It would be very useful to perform some simulations before deciding to use the chip as the sampling solution for our prototypes.

If the answer is negative, can you give me some advise for modelling the chip in spice? Have you done any simulations?

Thanks in advance,

Ignacio Diéguez Estremera.

  70   Mon May 3 11:09:12 2010 Stefan RittDRS4 chip model

Ignacio Diéguez Estremera wrote:

Hi all,

i'm an electronics engineering student at UCM (Madrid) working on my master's thesis within the CTA collaboration. I'm designing the readout electronics for the telescope's camera, and i'm focusing in using GAPDs instead of PMTs and using the domino chip for the sampling of the signal. I was wondering if there is a spice and/or RF model of the DRS4 chip available. It would be very useful to perform some simulations before deciding to use the chip as the sampling solution for our prototypes.

If the answer is negative, can you give me some advise for modelling the chip in spice? Have you done any simulations?

Thanks in advance,

Ignacio Diéguez Estremera.

Yes there is a transistor-level spice model, which I used to design the chip, but you won't be happy with it: Given the 500,000+ transistors on the chip, a 100 ns simulation takes a couple of weeks. We tried to make a simplified model just for the analog input using some measured S-parameters, but found that the RF behavior of the chip is almost impossible to describe to better than let's say 50%. In the end you have to fine-tune your analog front-end experimentally, to obtain optimal bandwidth. We are just working on a reference design with gives you 850 MHz bandwidth using an active input buffer.

  71   Mon May 3 17:06:02 2010 Ignacio Diéguez EstremeraDRS4 chip model

Stefan Ritt wrote:

Ignacio Diéguez Estremera wrote:

Hi all,

i'm an electronics engineering student at UCM (Madrid) working on my master's thesis within the CTA collaboration. I'm designing the readout electronics for the telescope's camera, and i'm focusing in using GAPDs instead of PMTs and using the domino chip for the sampling of the signal. I was wondering if there is a spice and/or RF model of the DRS4 chip available. It would be very useful to perform some simulations before deciding to use the chip as the sampling solution for our prototypes.

If the answer is negative, can you give me some advise for modelling the chip in spice? Have you done any simulations?

Thanks in advance,

Ignacio Diéguez Estremera.

Yes there is a transistor-level spice model, which I used to design the chip, but you won't be happy with it: Given the 500,000+ transistors on the chip, a 100 ns simulation takes a couple of weeks. We tried to make a simplified model just for the analog input using some measured S-parameters, but found that the RF behavior of the chip is almost impossible to describe to better than let's say 50%. In the end you have to fine-tune your analog front-end experimentally, to obtain optimal bandwidth. We are just working on a reference design with gives you 850 MHz bandwidth using an active input buffer.

 Thanks for the information.

I would like to try the huge :-) model. Can you send it to my email address? Since the input signal are pulses of a few nanoseconds at FHWM, the simulation time may be reduced. I will post some feedback in the forum once i give it a try.

Kind regards.

  72   Mon May 3 17:10:29 2010 Stefan RittDRS4 chip model

Ignacio Diéguez Estremera wrote:

Stefan Ritt wrote:

Ignacio Diéguez Estremera wrote:

Hi all,

i'm an electronics engineering student at UCM (Madrid) working on my master's thesis within the CTA collaboration. I'm designing the readout electronics for the telescope's camera, and i'm focusing in using GAPDs instead of PMTs and using the domino chip for the sampling of the signal. I was wondering if there is a spice and/or RF model of the DRS4 chip available. It would be very useful to perform some simulations before deciding to use the chip as the sampling solution for our prototypes.

If the answer is negative, can you give me some advise for modelling the chip in spice? Have you done any simulations?

Thanks in advance,

Ignacio Diéguez Estremera.

Yes there is a transistor-level spice model, which I used to design the chip, but you won't be happy with it: Given the 500,000+ transistors on the chip, a 100 ns simulation takes a couple of weeks. We tried to make a simplified model just for the analog input using some measured S-parameters, but found that the RF behavior of the chip is almost impossible to describe to better than let's say 50%. In the end you have to fine-tune your analog front-end experimentally, to obtain optimal bandwidth. We are just working on a reference design with gives you 850 MHz bandwidth using an active input buffer.

 Thanks for the information.

I would like to try the huge :-) model. Can you send it to my email address? Since the input signal are pulses of a few nanoseconds at FHWM, the simulation time may be reduced. I will post some feedback in the forum once i give it a try.

Kind regards.

I just checked and realized that we are not allowed to give out the "huge" model since it contains parameters from the chip manufacturer's library which are confidentially. 

  73   Mon May 3 23:21:55 2010 Ignacio Diéguez EstremeraDRS4 chip model

Stefan Ritt wrote:

Ignacio Diéguez Estremera wrote:

Stefan Ritt wrote:

Ignacio Diéguez Estremera wrote:

Hi all,

i'm an electronics engineering student at UCM (Madrid) working on my master's thesis within the CTA collaboration. I'm designing the readout electronics for the telescope's camera, and i'm focusing in using GAPDs instead of PMTs and using the domino chip for the sampling of the signal. I was wondering if there is a spice and/or RF model of the DRS4 chip available. It would be very useful to perform some simulations before deciding to use the chip as the sampling solution for our prototypes.

If the answer is negative, can you give me some advise for modelling the chip in spice? Have you done any simulations?

Thanks in advance,

Ignacio Diéguez Estremera.

Yes there is a transistor-level spice model, which I used to design the chip, but you won't be happy with it: Given the 500,000+ transistors on the chip, a 100 ns simulation takes a couple of weeks. We tried to make a simplified model just for the analog input using some measured S-parameters, but found that the RF behavior of the chip is almost impossible to describe to better than let's say 50%. In the end you have to fine-tune your analog front-end experimentally, to obtain optimal bandwidth. We are just working on a reference design with gives you 850 MHz bandwidth using an active input buffer.

 Thanks for the information.

I would like to try the huge :-) model. Can you send it to my email address? Since the input signal are pulses of a few nanoseconds at FHWM, the simulation time may be reduced. I will post some feedback in the forum once i give it a try.

Kind regards.

I just checked and realized that we are not allowed to give out the "huge" model since it contains parameters from the chip manufacturer's library which are confidentially. 

 Thank you for the effort anyway.

So i guess i won't be able to include drs4 in my simulations :-(. Any other suggestions? Maybe the S-params model you where working on? Anything is better than nothing :-)

  74   Tue May 4 11:26:21 2010 Stefan RittDRS4 chip model

Ignacio Diéguez Estremera wrote:

So i guess i won't be able to include drs4 in my simulations :-(. Any other suggestions? Maybe the S-params model you where working on? Anything is better than nothing :-)

Please find attached the S-parameters. 

  75   Tue May 4 16:23:16 2010 Ignacio Diéguez EstremeraDRS4 chip model

Stefan Ritt wrote:

Ignacio Diéguez Estremera wrote:

So i guess i won't be able to include drs4 in my simulations :-(. Any other suggestions? Maybe the S-params model you where working on? Anything is better than nothing :-)

Please find attached the S-parameters. 

 Thanks :-)

  76   Wed May 5 22:30:50 2010 Ignacio Diéguez EstremeraRandom noise spec in datasheet

Hi,

According to DRS4's datasheet, the random noise is 0.35mVrms. Is this the input equivalent noise voltage? It is computed over the 0-950MHz frequency band?

Regards.

  77   Thu May 6 08:15:39 2010 Stefan RittRandom noise spec in datasheet

Ignacio Diéguez Estremera wrote:

Hi,

According to DRS4's datasheet, the random noise is 0.35mVrms. Is this the input equivalent noise voltage? It is computed over the 0-950MHz frequency band?

Regards.

You cannot compare the DRS4 noise directly with an amplifier for example. The noise mainly comes from variations of the charge injection into the storage cells, and some noise during the readout process, which happens in a completely different frequency domain than the sampling.

So what I did is to keep the inputs open, measure a 1024-bin waveform, and compute the RMS of this waveform. So I believe that this is kind of equivalent noise voltage from 1-950 MHz. It does not start from zero since very low frequency noise (like 50 Hz) just causes a baseline shift and does not influence the RMS, but this is not so important since in most applications people do an event-by-event baseline subtraction to get rid of low frequency noise in their apparatus. The 0.35 mV RMS also depend on the electronics around the chip. On our USB evaluation board the noise it typically smaller (0.31 mV RMS), while in some VME board we measure 0.42 mV RMS. If you do the perfect analog design around the chip, you can maybe push this maybe even lower.

  78   Wed May 12 11:47:39 2010 Jinhong WangDRS4 chip model

Stefan Ritt wrote:

Ignacio Diéguez Estremera wrote:

So i guess i won't be able to include drs4 in my simulations :-(. Any other suggestions? Maybe the S-params model you where working on? Anything is better than nothing :-)

Please find attached the S-parameters. 

 Hi, we plan to do a time interpolating among the eight channels on a single chip to obtain a maximum 40 GSPS (or, maybe 30 GSPS ) sampling rate.  Hence RF behavior of the anlog input is very important for us.

Will you give us some advice on the modeling of  the anlog input circuit of the chip?  Perhaps just the Spice model of the analog input?

The attached S parameters I found  here is for fs =1 GSPS, what about fs=5GSPS?

thanks in advance,

                                                                               Jinhong Wang (wangjinh@mail.ustc.edu.cn  ;  alleyor.wang@gmail.com)

  79   Wed May 12 16:26:12 2010 Stefan RittDRS4 chip model

Jinhong Wang wrote:

Stefan Ritt wrote:

Ignacio Diéguez Estremera wrote:

So i guess i won't be able to include drs4 in my simulations :-(. Any other suggestions? Maybe the S-params model you where working on? Anything is better than nothing :-)

Please find attached the S-parameters. 

 Hi, we plan to do a time interpolating among the eight channels on a single chip to obtain a maximum 40 GSPS (or, maybe 30 GSPS ) sampling rate.  Hence RF behavior of the anlog input is very important for us.

Will you give us some advice on the modeling of  the anlog input circuit of the chip?  Perhaps just the Spice model of the analog input?

The attached S parameters I found  here is for fs =1 GSPS, what about fs=5GSPS?

thanks in advance,

                                                                               Jinhong Wang (wangjinh@mail.ustc.edu.cn  ;  alleyor.wang@gmail.com)

To be honest, we never really succeeded to do any good simulation above let's say 500 MHz. We carefully tried to simulate the bond wire of the chip, the parasitic capacitances of the traces of the chip etc. but we always were off by a factor or two or so. Other groups reported the same problems. Some even did some 3D simulation model, without success. So our conclusion is that if you are interested in anything precise above 500 MHz, do a measurement.

So our current best design is with the THS4508. There is an AC coupled version going to 600 MHz, and a DC coupled version (uses more power) going to 800 MHz (-3dB). If you use passive inputs with a transformer for example, you can't go above 220 MHz. Next week I will publish both designs in this forum.

  80   Thu May 13 19:14:27 2010 Hao HuanDVDD Problem of DRS 4

Hi Stefan,

    on our board some DRS chips draw a lot of current through DVDD after power-up and heat up significantly--it is true that our board doesn't have weak pull-down resistors at DENABLE and DWRITE output pins of FPGA, so this problem might have been caused by that, but a reinitialization of the Domino circuit doesn't help either. We tried different capacitors at DVDD and it seemed the larger the capacitance, the better the result--with a capacitor larger than 10nF some of the DRS chips could work happily in the normal way while if the capacitor is only 4.7nF all of them got very hot. Would you please provide some suggestions why there should be such a problem?

    Thanks a lot!

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