Control system of the Folded Tandem Accelerator at BARC

Full text: Different site-specific approaches are followed by accelerator laboratories to develop control systems. The requirements for the Folded Tandem Ion Accelerator (FOTIA) control system at BARC are that it should be upgradeable, scaleable and simple to maintain. Incorporating these requirements, we have developed control architecture (hardware as well as software), fibre optic data telemetry system, spark protection circuit and the hardware interface units. In FOTIA, the parameters of devices at various locations are controlled and monitored remotely using a computer based control system. The control system has been developed with PCs forming the different nodes, connected through an Ethernet with CAMAC as front-end system. PCs are used as consoles and servers. FOTIA parameters are monitored and controlled through PC3, which includes a CC8 CAMAC controller PC interface card. This interface card communicates with the CAMAC controllers with System Interconnect BUS (SIB). CAMAC consists of a crate controller, data display and different plug in modules for Analog as well as Digital signals. Scanning rate of the system is 1 ms and refreshing rate is 1 sec. The operating system is QNX. Graphical application is implemented in C++. Communication, run-time data database and objects are supported by the control system platform. Both QNX operating system and CAMAC have been tested and proven to meet the needs of FOTIA. The various CAMAC modules like Parallel Crate Controller with PC interface card, 16 channel scanning 12 bit ADC, channel 12 bit DAC, 24 bit isolated input, 24 bit isolated output, multi channel serial communication module used in the control system for FOTIA, were developed in the Electronics Division of BARC. For interfacing various power supplies with CAMAC, a number of hardware interface modules were developed in-house. A fibre optic data telemetry system was developed for control of the devices located in the high voltage environment. In order to get higher resolution required for controlling the magnet power supply, mult-channel serial communication CAMAC module is used. (author)