ATCA digital controller hardware for vertical stabilization of plasmas in tokamaks

The efficient vertical stabilization (VS) of plasmas in tokamaks requires a fast reaction of the VS controller, for example, after detection of edge localized modes (ELM). For controlling the effects of very large ELMs a new digital control hardware, based on the Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (TM) (ATCA), is being developed aiming to reduce the VS digital control loop cycle (down to an optimal value of 10 mu s) and improve the algorithm performance. The system has 1 ATCA T processor module and up to 12 ATCA T control modules, each one with 32 analog input channels (12 bit resolution), 4 analog output channels (12 bit resolution), and 8 digital input/output channels. The Aurora T and PCI Express T communication protocols will be used for data transport, between modules, with expected latencies below 2 mu s. Control algorithms are implemented on a ix86 based processor with 6 Gflops and on field programmable gate arrays with 80 GMACS, interconnected by serial gigabit links in a full mesh topology. (c) 2006 American Institute of Physics.