Cronologic Ndigo5G-10, User Manual

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2 Hardware
2.1 Installing the Board
The Ndigo5G board can be installed in any x4 (or higher amount of lanes) PCIe slot. If the slot
electrically supports less than 4 lanes, the board will operate at lowerdata throughput rates.
Please ensure proper cooling of the device. The Ndigo5G has an onboard temperature detec-
tion. If the ADC chip temperature exceeds 90
◦
C a warning is issued to the device driver. In case
the temperature is higher than 95
◦
C the ADC is disabled to avoid damage. Using a PCI-slot
cooler is in many cases an appropriate solution to circumvent problems caused by overheating
if the board is used inside a PC. The Ndigo-Crate will provide sufficient cooling under normal
operating conditions.
Using a single Ndigo5G, no further connections need to be made. For applications that
require more than 4 ADC channels, several Ndigo boards can be operated in sync. Any board
of the Ndigo product line can be synced to other Ndigo boards, allowing, for instance, for a
combination of high speed ADCs (Ndigo5G) and slower high resolution ADCs (Ndigo250M-14)
or the upcoming Ndigo TDC.
The signals used for board synchronization and inter-board triggering are transferred on a
bus be-tween the boards. Join all C2 connectors (see Figure 2.3 on page 5 ) on the boards using
a ribbon cable. Both ends of the bus need to be terminated properly. If using a Ndigo Crate,
connectors providing the termination are located on the crate mainboard next to the PCIe slots
to the extreme left and right. For more details, please refer to the Ndigo Crate user guide. In
applications that use only a few Ndigo boards installed directly inside a PC, termination PCBs
available from cronologic can be used.
Ndigo5G’s standard device driver can be used to read out all boards and acquire data. For
more complex scenarios, using the cronoSync-library, which is part of cronoTools, is recom-
mended. The cronoSync library is provided with the Ndigo device driver. Please refer to the
cronoTools user guide for more information.
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