Speaker
Description
This work presents the hardware design and performance evaluation of a new Low-Level Radio Frequency (LLRF) system developed for the ALBA synchrotron, operating at the third harmonic frequency of 1.5 GHz. The system is implemented on a MicroTCA (uTCA) platform and is composed of a Rear Transition Module (RTM) that performs the analog front-end processing and down-conversion to an intermediate frequency, together with an Advanced Mezzanine Card (AMC) that digitizes the RF signals at high speed and provides all digital interfaces required by the control system. The hardware platform supplies all necessary resources for the ALBA firmware team to instantiate their own DSP algorithms, feedback loops, synchronization blocks, and machine-specific control strategies, ensuring full flexibility for future developments.
This work describes in detail the architecture of the designed hardware, including clock distribution, signal conditioning, conversion stages, digital interfaces, and integration within the uTCA ecosystem. Experimental results are presented both from laboratory characterization and from commissioning tests performed at the ALBA synchrotron. These results demonstrate that the system meets the required performance in terms of stability, noise, linearity, dynamic range, and timing accuracy, validating the suitability of the developed LLRF hardware for high-precision accelerator operation.
| Paper status | No proceeding expected for this contribution. |
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