The NA48 data acquisition system

NA48 is a CP violation experiment that is starting its period of data taking at the CERN SPS accelerator. The expected average data rate of a few thousand events/s (with the possibility to go up to 10 kHz), a data volume up to 100 MB/s sustained over the beam burst, and the necessity to handle different subsystems with very wide variation in the number of channels have lead to the design of a modular pipelined data acquisition system with a sampling rate of 25 ns.