Ryan Herbst

Waking up to snow in Yosemite

Ryan Herbst — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 04:07:03 +0000

One part “Oh how beautifull!” another part “Oh crap, I have to tow out of here today!”

Pictures Of CXI Detector

Ryan — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 04:19:29 +0000

Here are two pictures of 1/4 of the SLAC LCLS CXI detector. Here you see a quadrant containing 4 separate modules consisting of 2 diode modules. Each diode module (the shiny reflective surface) is bump bonded onto two amplifier/readout ASICs. The diode modules and the readout ASICs where designed by a group at Cornell. The flexible carrier board (the brown cable plugged into the green board), the two green circuit boards and the rest of the readout electronics are my design. One of the two circuit boards contains analog support circuits which contain a series of digital potentiometers to set bias currents and some buffers for the digital control lines. The second circuit board contains an FPGA which operates the 16 readout ASICs, reads out the data and sends it over a proprietary protocol.

A concentrator board is connected to four of these quadrants and formats the data before sending that data to the LCLS data acquisition system. The entire system generates around 5Gbps of data when running at 120hz.

The purpose of the CXI detector is to record X-Rays of biological samples at LCLS. You can read more about the LC LS experiment here.

-Ryan

My Patents Were Awarded!

Ryan — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 10:06:42 +0000

I just found out that two patents I had applied for back at Candera were awared on December 30, 2008. Although I had been awared one patent before at Mayan Networks, these two patents are much more gratifiying.

Although I had helped out in the digital implementation of the first patent the design on which the patent was based was not my own. The two recent patents were the direct result of my design ideas (along with others). I had been watching for these patents occasionally over the past few years and had not really expected them to be awared.

Anyway here is the information on the two recent patents from Candera:

7,472,237, Apparatus to offload and accelerate pico code processing running in a storage processor

7,472,231, Storage area network data cache

And here is the previous one from Mayan Networks:

6,956,858, Network routing table and packet routing method