PANDA DAQT and FrontEnd Electronics Workshop, Rauischholzhausen Castle

Because of the complexity and the high startup cost of ATCA, initial PANDA DAQ development activities in Forschungszentrum Juelich concentrate on MicroTCA. MicroTCA provides a smooth path to ATCA, since MicroTCA boards can be reused in ATCA shelves by means of AMC carriers and all essential technological challenges, e.g. Management and high speed serial communication links on the backplane, can be studied in MicroTCA systems, too. As a starting point a multivendor system of crates, MCHs, CPUs and peripheral boards from several companies was set up in oder to establish a development platform and in order to investigate functionality and interoperability issues. The talk presents first experiences with MicroTCA and reports on the status of the ongoing AMC module developments.