Universal I/O board for the laser-electron photons experiments at SPring-8

A data acquisition system on the basis of network technologies has been developed for experiments using high-energy photons from backward-Compton scattering between laser lights and 8 GeV electrons at SPring-8. A universal I/O VME-board (UIO) is designed as a buffer-sequencer module with a reconfigurable logic circuit and a 1 Mbyte memory. The UIO is applied as a high-speed module for flexible data readout and buffering. Data from the various detectors are transferred from the UIO to a VME CPU-board in the common format. Altera Hardware Description Language is used to read data from a fast encoding and readout ADC (FERA) system for TOF counters and Cherenkov counters.