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CAEN solution for powering in hostile areas

EASY (Embedded Assembly SYstem) is the CAEN high/low voltage power supply solution every time residual magnetic fields and/or radiation become an issue.

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Why EASY? 

CAEN developed different solutions to satisfy the requirements from LHC experiments where electronic equipment deals with high radiation dose and strong residual magnetic fields. To provide safe and reliable operations in these “hostile areas”, CAEN created a new product line featuring rad-tolerant and magnetic resistant components with excellent performance also in normal conditions, this patented technology is the backbone of all EASY modules. 

Widely used in LHC experiments the EASY solutions have been declined in more than 7 500 electronic units containing about 200 000 sub-boards. 

System Concept 

The EASY power supply can be directly located in the hostile area while the control of the system can be done remotely using a Branch Controller (model A116A) inserted in a SY4527 or SY5527 mainframe located in the control room. Through the mainframe users can immediately and automatically control all board with the Detector Control System or any other custom control software, this is achieved using OPC server that runs on the mainframes. 

Flexibility and Compatibility 

Each branch controller can handle up to 6 EASY crates. The A1676A is a one-unit wide board so the SY4527 and SYS5527 can house up to 16 and 6 branch controller boards respectively and therefore enabling the monitoring of 96 or 36 EASY modules. The A1676A can work side by side with standard HV/LV boards so a single SY4527 can be used for multiple applications. 

The EASY family provides a wide variety of output voltages to satisfy the requirement of most detector and front-end electronics including POL DC/DC converters (LV up to 100 A and HV up to 12 kV), giving an unique interface and a cost effective setup for all experimental requirements. 

block scheme of easyArchitecture

The EASY3000 (for boards up to 40 cm long, A3XXX family) can house up to 10 boards (depending on board width). As illustrated in the figure on the right, the branch controller is the EASY interface between the mainframe unit (SY4527 or SY5527) and the remote boards in the EASY create.

The branch controller role is to configure the EASY channels as the belong to the supply unit slot in which the branch controller is placed.

In this way, all channels of the EASY boards will be considered as channels of the branch controller board, increasing the number of channels the system can handle.

Tolerances

  • Magnetic field: up to 2 kGauss
  • Radiation:
    • up to 1·1011 p/cm2 Total Dose
    • up to 2·1012 n/cm2 Total Dose
    • up to 15 kRad Total Integrated Dose

EASY6000

easy 6000 product photos

Thanks to the extremely flexible architecture, EASY6000 allows more configurations than the previous generation​ (EASY3000) with new harsh converters for very hostile area (>200 Gy) to be placed closer to the detector (~m) optimizing cable power loss​.

A new faster and responsive connection to DCS is now possible to the brand new R6060 branch controller with 1Gb Ethernet; the connection to EASY remote boards has been implemented with CAN for back-compatibility, SFP+ for high-bandwidth and RS-485 to guarantee a robustness and easy implementation.

EASY6000 has been developed with  300VDC input for Power and 48VDC input for Service Power, thus improving the  and simplifying power delivery from service to experimental caverns; starting from 6x higher voltage the current become 6x less, allowing for much less cable area to have the same power efficiency or much better power efficiency keeping the same cables​.

 


We celebrate 20 years of CAEN EASY, the power supply system designed for LHC experiments 

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