13.7. XLM-72 based modlues

Several devices supported by FRIB/NSCLDAQ are based on the XLM-72 FPGA based module. In the FRIB, in order to allow each module to be interchanged, the firmware for these modules is not loaded from PROM but loaded into the SRAM. The FPGA is then told to load its firmware from SRAM and initiate operations.

The offline nature of mvlcgenerate means that you have two choices for how to handle the firmware for these devices:

• Load the firmware at the start of data taking. This can be time consuming but will work.

• Load the firmware external to data taking and don't load the firmware ever again, as long as power is maintained on the crate.

We support both modes of operation. The program mvlc_xlmload describes a program that can load an XLM-72's firmware over the MVLC. Each of the XLM support modules, in addition to providing an option to provide the name of the firmware file, provides a -load-firmware option which, when true, produces code to load the firmware each time data taking starts.