Electronics and DAQ system for INO-ICAL prototype detector

A 1m^3 prototype detector, built of RPCs as detector elements is proposed by the INO group for a feasibility study.  Immediate need of Electronics and DAQ to support the proposal had driven the designers to develop a simple, modular and scalable system in a short period. Here, we need to record the event time, three dimensional particle interaction tracks in the detector and its direction. The system need to acquire near to a thousand channels of information. The front end electronics are housed as close to the detector and registers the track information on a trigger. The relative time information related to the track direction are registered in the back end CAMAC system. The trigger invokes a interrupt routine which initiates the transfer of registered data from the front end to the CAMAC DAQ system serially and records data to PC. The system monitors over all health of detector by recording noise rate periodically. The DAQ program is developed under Linux. In later period, the CAMAC system in the backend is transformed to a VME system to gain hands on experience to handle few millions of channels in the proposed final INO-ICAL detector.