• S. Cohen
  Bira, Albuquerque, New Mexico
• G.W. East, R.W. Ellis
  IUCMB, Bloomington, Indiana

A four-channel magnet-power-supply ramp controller has been designed and deployed at the new ALPHA (Advanced Electron Photon Facility) at the IUCMB (Indiana University Center for Matter and Beams). The first application is a power-supply controller; however, the system is a versatile arbitrary voltage-waveform generator with full DAQ (data acquisition) capabilities that can be used in a variety of beam instrumentation settings. The real-time controller can generate four arbitrary, independently-triggerable ramp profiles. A normalized wave-form array is encoded as a Process Variable array and is uploaded and stored by the real-time controller as required. Each ramp array is clocked out to a 16-bit DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) via a DMA FIFO and built-in FPGA. The duration of the waveform is programmable with a minimum time resolution of 20 usec between profile values. Four bipolar DACs have an output range of ± 10V. Eight digital I/O control bits are allocated for each control channel. Typically, these bits are used to monitor and control the power-supply operational state. The control-system interface uses the EPICS Channel-Access server accessible on Labview RT 2009.