MUROS

Nationaal instituut voor subatomaire fysica

Introduction

The first Medipix Universal Read-Out System (MUROS) was designed to read out the Medipix1 chip. With the advent of the Medipix2 and Timepix chips, first the hardware and later the FPGA code were updated to accommodate all the chips of the Medipix family.

Description

The Muros2 board is an interface between a board carrying a maximum of eight Medipix2 chips and a National Instruments DIO-653X board. The Muros2 has been developed at NIKHEF as a successor to the Muros1 board, designed for Medipix1. The system requires the following c omponents in order to function properly:

A standard PC running the appropriate software (Pixelman or Medisoft 4).
A National Instruments DIO-653X card.
A Muros2 board.
A Medipix2 chipboard or an adequate device to interface Medipix2 chips.

Documentation

You can download the documentation file of the Muros2.0 device here (PDF file, 2,000,841 bytes) and here (PDF file, 68,012 bytes) you can get the documentation describing changes in the version 2.1. For the schematics go to download page (password protected).

Hardware requirements

In order to work with Muros2 you will need access to the 220V electric network. You will also need a 68-pin cable to connect the Muros2 to the chipboard containing the Medipix2 chip. The type of cable to use is: Ultra .8mm 68 male (VHDCI) to Ultra .8mm 68 male (VHDCI) - External Ultra SCSI cable. You should be able to order it from any SCSI cable manufacturer/distributor (ABIX, Starmount, Black Box, ...) or in some computer shops.

Note that, in principle, it doesn't matter to us if the cable is listed as "single ended" (SE) or "differential" (LVD) as this refers to the type of SCSI protocol used, and we do not use any SCSI protocol, but only the cable.