FPGA-based data acquisition system for a Compton camera

A data acquisition (DAQ) system with custom back-plane and custom readout boards has been developed for a Compton camera prototype. The DAQ system consists of two layers. The first layer has units for parallel high-speed analog-to-digital conversion and online data pre-processing. The second layer has a central board to form a general event trigger and to build the data structure for the event. This modularity and the use of field programmable gate arrays make the whole DAQ system highly flexible and adaptable to modified experimental setups. The design specifications, the general architecture of the Trigger and DAQ system and the implemented readout protocols are presented in this paper.