An interface board for the control and data acquisition of the Medipix2 chip

We have designed an interface board between the Medipix2 chip and a general-purpose commercial PCI-based acquisition card, making the Medipix2 fully controllable from a PC. The main component on the board is an FPGA that implements the data transmission between the chip and the PC, as well as a number of internal registers to control them operation of the chip. Besides the FPGA, the board also includes a number of data converters for different purposes, a timing source, power supply regulators to generate the power supply voltage needed by the chip, and some level converters to accommodate the different logic levels at the PC, FPGA and Medipix2 chip. The board has been designed to interface with a chip-board containing a maximum of eight Medipix2 chips. The Medipix2 chips are read out via their serial data interface using the LVDS standard. We will describe the design of the board, its operational characteristics and show how the board has been used to characterize the Medipix2 chip. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.