Fast data acquisition system for the spectrometer SMART at RIKEN

A new data acquisition system has been introduced for experiments using the spectrometer SMART at RIKEN. It is about ten times as fast as the previous system based on the standard CAMAC (Ichihara et al., IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci. 36 (1989) 1628), but is dedicated to the use of LeCroy FERA and FERA-compatible modules. Data are accumulated in a VME memory module through the FERA bus and then DMA-transferred to a personal computer running a free Unix-clone, Linux. Since no CPU or peripheral is required on VME, the system is very cost-effective and suitable for experiments already using FERA.