Abstract:
Background The iLinac superconducting linear accelerator in the Heavy Ion Accelerator Facility (HIAF) must operate stably for extended periods in a cryogenic vacuum environment, facing risks such as cavity quenches and helium pressure anomalies. Traditional FPGA or PLC-based protection schemes suffer from poor coordination or millisecond-level delays, resulting in inadequate performance for meeting microsecond-level protection requirements.
Purpose Design of a radio frequency integrated protection system to address issues such as low coordination efficiency, insufficient resource utilization, and high latency, thereby achieving microsecond-level reliable protection.
Methods A ZYNQ SoC-based architecture combines FPGA parallel processing (for interlocks) and ARM management. Fiber-optic I/O multiplexes multi-source signals, reducing interface count by 75%. Reliability is assessed via MTBF/MTTR analysis.
Results Experiments indicate that the response time of the fiber-optic interface is less than 1.78 μs, and that of dry-contact signals is below 130 μs. The system enables real-time monitoring of the full-link status of critical signals and provides visual control based on the CS-Studio platform. It has been successfully deployed in the HIAF iLinac superconducting segment and is operating stably.
Conclusions The system provides microsecond response, high reliability, and centralized monitoring, offering a reusable solution for superconducting accelerator protection.