The upgrade of the Control and data Acquisition system of RFXMod2

RFXMod2 is an upgrade of RFXMod that will use a modified shell and mechanical structure in order to enhance plasma proximity to the shell and therefore to improve plasma control. The Control and Data Acquisition System for most of the plant systems and diagnostics previously used in RFXMod will be refurbished, while others will be completely re-built. The most important component that will be completely renewed is the Electromagnetic Probes (EM) data acquisition system. In the former system data acquisition and real-time control were implemented using two different technologies, i.e. CompactPCI and VME, respectively. In RFXMod2 a new architecture based on XILINX Zynq FPGA will be used to carry out at the same time both high-speed data acquisition and resampled data streaming for active plasma control. Moreover, numeric integration of EM signals will be carried out by the same FPGA supervising data acquisition and streaming. The use of MDSplus will be retained in RFXMod2, while the MARTe framework used for real-time plasma control will be replaced by MARTe2, a new framework developed under strict software quality standards. Plant control in RFXMod2 will be supervised by WinCC-OA, replacing the previous FactoryLink SCADA systems. Older plant units such as vacuum control using outdated S5 PLCs will be replaced by new systems, using OPC communication with the supervisory system. Old CAMAC equipment in diagnostics will be replaced by CompactPCI technology, making it uniform with the rest of the diagnostic data acquisition systems. Finally, specialized devices implemented in CAMAC such as timing sequence generators will be replaced by custom devices implemented using the same Zynq FPGA technology of the EM data acquisition devices.