Design and test methodology for a reconfigurable PEM data acquisition electronics system

The purpose of this paper is to present the main aspects of a design and test (D&T) methodology used in the development of a specific type of system. The application focuses medical imaging using a compact positron emission mammography (PEM) detector with 12288 channels, targeting high selectivity and spatial resolution. The system operates at 100 MHz, with a data acquisition rate of 1 million events per second, under a total single photon background rate in the detector of 10 MHz. In this paper, the data acquisition electronics (DAE) system of the clear-PEM detector is used as vehicle for demonstrating the characteristics and versatility of the D&T methodology. For production and lifetime test, robust functional-oriented built-in self test (BIST) structures are developed. A design challenge in this context is the need to identify relevant data out of a huge amount of data streams. Another design challenge is the need to guaranty synchronism, without which data would become meaningless. Hierarchy, modularity, parallelism and pipelining are extensively exploited to meet these stringent system requirements. DAE implementation involves eight 4-million, one 2-million and one 1-million gate FPGAs (Xilinx Virtex II).