The PSI 'VPC' board - first applications of a common digital back-end for electron and proton beam instrumentation at PSI

This report gives an overview of the design concept and applications of the VME PMC Carrier board (VPC), a VME64x board that was developed at PSI as a common digital back-end for beam instrumentation at the PSI electron and proton accelerators. The two Xilinx Virtex2Pro FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Array) of the VPC allow the implementation of the complete digital section of a beam instrumentation system on a single chip ('SOC'), including detector front-end interface, filters, interlocks, feedback links, high-level data analysis like FFTs, and a generic control system interface. In addition to the 2 on-chip PowerPC processors of the FPGAs, the VPC provides a DSP, RAM, and multi-giga-bit fibre optic links for distributed feedbacks and synchronization. First applications of the VPC include digital proton beam position monitors (DBPMs) and beam profile monitors (BPMs) for the PSI proton accelerators, the readout of several thousand detector channel waveforms for a muon decay experiment, and the integration of photon BPMs into the SLS fast orbit feedback. In addition to a status report and first results for these applications, an outlook on possible future applications of the VPC will be given. (authors)