Hardware accelerated UDP/IP module for high speed data acquisition in nuclear detector systems

We propose an implementation of a data acquisition hardware description language module including an in-house soft MAC that is fast enough to exploit the bandwidth of gigabit Ethernet. The data acquisition module is able to receive events from independent channels with equal priority and transmit them via gigabit Ethernet to a PC. The maximum data transfer speed is over 800 Mbit/s; in other words, the channels can reach an aggregated event rate of 6.5 million event/s using 128-bit events. As a result of the low-level UDP/IP dedicated approach, the module uses relatively few FPGA resources.