Control System of RF Stations for NICA Booster

NICA (Nuclotron based Ion Collider fAcility) is an accelerator complex, which is being built in JINR (Dubna, Russia). The system described in this paper is controlling the RF stations of Booster, the first element of the NICA complex. Control System consists of two devices: Intellectual Controller and Tester module. The first one is designed for precise measurement of magnetic field, generation of the acceleration frequency in accordance with measured field and control of RF power and pre-amplifiers. Intellectual Controller is a real-time feed-forward system with 40 μs loop time. It is based on ARM microcontroller and bare-metal control programs are used to reach maximum performance. Approaches that were used to achieve maximum performance are elaborated and presented in this paper. The second part of system Tester is a simulator for tuning and checking the RF stations before start of operations or in absence of real accelerator. The achieved accuracy in chain ’magnetic field’ – ’acceleration frequency’ is better than 5 · 10−5. Plans on feedback incorporation to stabilize ion beam behavior via frequency and phase tuning are discussed.