NICMASS Electronics

The NICMASS drive electronics are based on a Micromint BCC52 single card computer. The two cards pictured here are expansion cards which plug into a common bus. The lower third of the card is hardwired bus demultiplexing circuitry. The upper two thirds is a wire-wrap/prototyping area. The card on the left controls the digital clock level which drive the NICMOS3 array and sets several analog voltage levels through 8-bit digital-to-analog converters. The right hand card contains four 14-bit Crystal Semiconductor analog-to-digital converters (CS5014) which sample the four quadrants of the array with a 14-microsecond sample time. Below the analog-to-digital converters are current-loop transceiver chips which permit the transmission of the serial output of the analog-to-digital converters over great distances. The time required to reset and read the chip is 300 milliseconds.

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Last Update: 10/28/1993