FPGAs widen the ARGO-YBJ experiment´s eyes

The ARGO-YBJ experiment is presently under construction at the Yangbaijing High-Altitude Cosmic Ray Laboratory (4300 m a.s.l), 90 km north to Lhasa (Tibet, People´s Republic of China). ARGO will study fundamental issues in cosmic ray and astroparticle physics by detecting small-size air showers. The detector covers 74 × 78 m² with single layer resistive plate counters (RPCs), surrounded by a partially instrumented guard ring. The ARGO Data Acquisition System is designed around static random access memory (SRAM)-based field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), in order to achieve a fully reconfigurable architecture. In this environment, the same hardware platform performs different functions provided by companion FPGAs´ configuration files. Control and monitoring software exploits a web browser to deliver commands and perform diagnostic tests on the boards. In this paper, we describe the hardware and the software strategies that allow the ARGO DAQ to benefit from the flexible architecture of in-system reconfigurable FPGAs