The Data Acquisition System of WEST’s New Thomson Scattering Diagnostics

WEST, the Tungsten Environment in Steady-state Tokamak at IRFM (France), is currently being equipped with two new plasma-monitoring systems based on Thomson scattering. Nearly 50 optical viewing lines will be installed to collect scattered light near the core plasma region and in the plasma pedestal. The collected light pulses are forwarded along optical fiber bundles to polychromators where they are optically filtered into five channels and converted to swift electrical pulses. A custom fast digitizer board adapted to the polychromators was designed to capture these signals. This Nectarine board provides six triggered fast channels to catch the scattered pulse shape at 1–3.2 GS/s, thanks to three Nectar chips. Six additional ADC channels provide a slower sampling rate for background monitoring. This contribution describes and discusses the performances of the real-time data acquisition and processing system (PS), especially the Nectarine board, designed specifically for WEST’s new Thomson scattering diagnostics (TSDs).