Improved Data Acquisition System for CREAM-III

The CREAM (Cosmic Ray Energetics And Mass) Data AcQuisition (CDAQ) system showed excellent stability and robustness during the 2004/05 and 2005/06 Antarctic campaigns. One improvement for the CREAM-III DAQ system is a redundant Science Flight Computer (SFC), which was a potential single point failure for the previous flights. Another improvement is a high speed USB 2.0 interface between the SFC and the detectors to allow better data collection efficiency. New CDAQ hardware and software for the USB interface were successfully tested during the 2006 accelerator calibration of the CREAM-III calorimeter. The hardware architecture design, software implementation and performance evaluation of the CREAM-III DAQ system are presented in this paper.