General overview

The PANIC instrument control electronics is based on the computer infrastructure of Calar Alto. Standarized Calar Alto instrumentation boards and devices are forseen. The connection to the instrument workstation is realized via a Local Area Network. The central process computer for PANIC is a x86 multicore PC. Most of the other function units are independent, intelligent devices. The following table shows the chosen devices and their manufacturers.

The next figure shows a simplified block diagram of the instrument control electronics.

Motion Controller

The heart of the PANIC Motor Controller is the standard MPIA MoCon board with a phyCORE-XC161 Single Board Computer module on it. This MoCon board is a multi-functional device, which is able to control a huge variety of motors. Due to the modular concept, the MoCon electronics is capable to drive stepper motors as well as servo loop motors. Core of the hardware is a 16 bit Infineon Controller, which contains the firmware managing the communication and command functions. For motion controlling the electronics is equipped with two motion processors from Performance Motion Devices.