A control unit for a Digitizer System for the PANDA Electromagnetic Calorimeter

PANDA is the next generation hadron physics detector under construction at the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Darmstadt, Germany to accurately detect and parameterize particles with kinetic energies from 1MeV to 8GeV. PANDA is a 4π detector and due to its unique shape, all the readout electronic from ADC modules, power supplies, and a controller unit is housed in the liquid-cooled crates mounted inside the detector. Therefore, the readout electronics are exposed to a high level of magnetic field and radiation. The controller unit as the critical component of the digitization system with adequate radiation resiliency governs the crate. The control unit manages power supplies, monitors the radiation damages of each ADC modules, offer a mechanism to re-program the ADC module firmware, and finally features a redundant communication for the crate over fiber optics. The purpose of this thesis is to study and design the controller unit hardware that meets the specification of the PANDA experiment