FTU bolometer electronic system upgrade

► Design and realization of a new bolometer electronic system. ► Many improvements over the actual commercial system. ► Architecture based on digital electronic hardware with minimal analog front end. ► Auto off-set correction, real time visualization features and small system size. ► Test results for the electronic system. The FTU (Frascati Tokamak Upgrade) requires a bolometer diagnostic in order to measure the total plasma radiation. The current diagnostic architecture is based on a full analog multichannel AC bolometer system, which uses a carrier frequency amplifier with a synchronous demodulation. Taking into account the technological upgrades in the field of electronics, it was decided to realize an upgrade for the bolometric electronic system by using a hybrid analog/digital implementation. The new system developed at the ENEA Frascati laboratories has many improvements, and mainly a massive system volume reduction, a good measurement linearity and a simplified use. The new hardware system consists of two subsystems: the Bolometer Digital Control and the Bolometer Analog System. The Bolometer Digital Control can control 16 bolometer bridges through the Bolometer Analog System. The Bolometer Digital Control, based on the FPGA architecture, is connected via Ethernet with a PC; therefore, it can receive commands settings from the PC and send the stream of bolometric measurements in real time to the PC. In order to solve the cross-talk between the bridges and the cables, each of the four bridges in the bolometer head receives a different synthesized excitation frequency. Since the system is fully controlled by a PC GUI (Graphic User Interface), it is very user friendly. Moreover, some useful features have been developed, such as: auto off-set correction, bridge amplitude regulation, software gain setting, real time visualization, frequency excitation selection and noise spectrum analyzer embedded function. In this paper, the hardware and software system architectures are described and some tests of the developed system are presented, with a related statistical analysis.