Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are powerful pieces of programmable electronics we we use in our data acquisition systems. They can drive and receive data from optical links with more than 10 GBit/s and at the same time offer memory and logic for fast data processing on board.
Currently we mainly use FPGAs from Altera, which we program in VHDL. A series of development kits allows us to quickly test algorithms and help with the VHDL training.
We have a running test data acquisition where we communicate with a PC over PCI Express, which we use e.g. for the MuPix Telescope.