Soudan 2 Data Acquisition and Trigger Electronics

The 1.1 kton Soudan 2 calorimetric drift-chamber detector is read out by 16K anode wires and 32K cathode strips. Preamps from each wire or strip are bussed together in groups of 8 to reduce the number of ADC channels. The resulting 6144 channels of ionization signal are flash-digitized every 200 ns and stored in RAM. The raw data hit patterns are continually compared with programmable trigger multiplicity and adjacency conditions. The data acquisition process is managed in a system of 24 parallel crates each containing an Intel 80C86 microprocessor, which supervises a pipe-lined data compactor, and allows transfer of the compacted data via CAMAC to the host computer. The 80C86´s also manage the local trigger conditions and can perform some parallel processing of the data. Due to the scale of the system and multiplicity of identical channels, semi-custom gate array chips are used for much of the logic, utilizing 2.5 micron CMOS technology.