A control board for optical modules of a high-energy neutrino telescope

The NEutrino Mediterranean Observatory (NEMO) collaboration is involved in research and development work intended to lead to the construction of an underwater cu km scale Cerenkov neutrino detector. This huge detector will be divided into thousands of tree-interconnected modules, hereafter called optical modules or Benthos spheres. The optical modules will be composed of stand-alone underwater spheres connected upwards by a coaxial cable along which digital data will be transferred and received and by which the optical module will be powered. In this paper, an electronic board prototype for the optical modules is described in detail as regards signal synchronization, filtering, data compression and packing. In other words, we present the control electronics part for the optical modules. The digital blocks have been developed by means of a VHDL-based FPGA design. (Author)