Welcome to the IPbus documentation!

This is the documentation for the IPbus firmware-software suite. If you want to read a brief introduction to IPbus continue reading this page; otherwise, please click on the links in the left navigation bar for more detailed information.

Brief introduction to IPbus

The IPbus protocol is a simple packet-based control protocol for reading and modifying memory-mapped resources within FPGA-based hardware devices which have a virtual A32/D32 bus.

The IPbus suite of software and firmware implement a reliable high-performance control link for particle physics electronics, based on the IPbus protocol. This suite has successfully replaced VME control in several large projects, and consists of the following components:

IPbus firmware

Modules that implement the IPbus protocol within end-user hardware.

ControlHub

A software application that mediates simultaneous hardware access from multiple uHAL clients, and implements the IPbus reliability mechanism over UDP 1

uHAL

The Hardware Access Library (HAL) providing an end-user C++/Python API for IPbus reads, writes and RMW (read-modify-write) transactions.

Further reading

The most recent paper describing IPbus is from the proceedings for TWEPP2014

C. Ghabrous Larrea, K. Harder, D. Newbold, D. Sankey, A. Rose, A. Thea and T. Williams, “IPbus: a flexible Ethernet-based control system for xTCA hardware”, JINST 10 (2015) no.02, C02019. DOI: 10.1088/1748-0221/10/02/C02019

Citation

When referring to the IPbus software and/or firmware in a publication, please cite the TWEPP 2014 paper mentioned above; the bibtex entry for this paper can be found here

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Footnotes

1

Any loss re-ordering or duplication of the IPbus UDP packets is automatically corrected by the ControlHub, using the IPbus reliability mechanism, such that packet loss does NOT have to be considered when using the uHAL API if all control traffic is routed via a ControlHub.