A flexible readout board for HEP experiments

This thesis will present my contributions to the development of the PiLUP board along with a general overview of its features and capabilities. The PiLUP board is a general-purpose FPGA-based readout board for data acquisition systems under development by the University of Bologna and the Instituto Nazionale Fisica Nucleare (INFN) and intended for high energy physics experiments, where the sheer amount of data generated by detectors often requires custom hardware solutions. This board was initially proposed for the next upgrade of the ATLAS Pixel detector. In this context its purpose would be to interface the Front-End readout chip RD53A with the FELIX card and provide advanced testing features such as an emulator for the RD53A that will help the development of the other parts of the data acquisition chain. Nonetheless, since the early stages of development, the hardware has been designed to offer great flexibility so that the same hardware platform could be directly used in other applications. To this purpose an important feature of the board is the great extendibility offered by the presence of different interfaces, such as and 3 FMC connectors (two low density and one high density), a PCI Express x8 interface, gigabit ethernet and an integrated SFP connector. The computing power of the PiLUP is provided by of two FPGAs, a Zynq-7 SoC and a Kintex-7 produced by Xilinx, intended to be used in master-slave configuration. In this case the Zynq, with its dual-core ARM processor and the possibility to run an embedded linux distribution, would be used as main interface with the other functionalities in the board. The main objective of this thesis is the development of such software and firmware control infrastructure, starting from the firmware solutions for the inter-FPGA communication to the low-level software to control the system.