Gallium arsenide digital integrated circuits for controlling SLAC CW-RF systems

In order to fill the PEP and SPEAR storage rings with beams from the SLC linac and damping rings, precise control of the linac subharmonic buncher and the damping ring RF is required. Recently several companies have developed resettable GaAs master/slave D-type flip-flops which are capable of operating at frequencies of 3 GHz and higher. Using these digital devices as frequency dividers, one can phase shift the SLAC CW-RF systems to optimize the timing for filling the storage rings. We have evaluated the performance of integrated circuits from two vendors for our particular application. Using microstrip circuit techniques, we have built and operated in the accelerator several chassis to synchronize a reset signal from the storage rings to the SLAC 2.856 GHz RF and to phase shift divide-by-four and divide-by-sixteen frequency dividers to the nearest 350 psec bucket required for filling. 4 refs., 4 figs., 2 tabs