Design and application of readout module ZYNQBee with Gigabit Ethernet interface based on ZYNQ

[Background] Traditional nuclear electronics readout system, like 'FPGA + ARM' combination, can not meet requirements of physical experiments in light if the physical size and power consumption. ZYNQ is a new all programmable SoC (System On Chip) architecture of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) with dual-core high performance ARM Cortex-A9 processors from Xilinx. [Purpose] This study aims to develop a ZYNQ based readout module called ZYNQBee, which has lower profile, lower power and higher bandwidth performance between ARM and FPGA. [Methods] The ZYNQ XC7Z010 is employed as the kernel chip to build the ZYNQBee system by overcoming difficulties of hardware and software design including DDR3 (Double Data Rate 3) SDRAM (Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory) layout, interface of Gigabit Ethernet, transplant of Embedded Linux and so on. [Results] ZYNQBee has been used as nuclear electronics readout module of the high pure Germanium (HPGe) detector system in CDEX (China Dark matter EXperiment), and it is tested to have more than 700 Mb · s^-1 Ethernet throughput on average. [Conclusion] ZYNQBee performs better than traditional designs, provides more powerful design flexibilities and functionalities. (authors)