Job description:
SOLEIL is the French national synchrotron facility, located on the Saclay Plateau near Paris. It is a multi-disciplinary instrument and research laboratory whose mission is to conduct research using synchrotron radiation, to develop cutting edge instrumentation on the beamlines, and to make these developments available to the scientific community. SOLEIL synchrotron, a unique tool for both academic research and industrial applications across a wide range of disciplines including physics, biology, chemistry etc., opened in 2008. It is used annually by thousands researchers from France and abroad. SOLEIL is based on a synchrotron source that is state-of-the-art both in terms of brilliance and stability. This large scale facility, a partner of the Université Paris Saclay, is a “publically owned” private company, founded by the CNRS and the CEA.
This position is in the Detectors group of the Experience division. The Detectors group mission consists to develop, realize and operate performant experimental devices, necessary to the well-functioning and to maintain the best level of competitiveness of the beam lines. In this context, the Detectors group is developing a fast photon counting detector, based on hybrid pixel technology, in order to improve the detection performance of beamlines for different types of experiments: time resolved diffraction experiments, kinetic studies, and other experiments requiring a fast readout and granular detector.
Detailed mission:
I.Mission
The candidate will be in charge of firmware and software development of the acquisition system (DAQ) for programming, controlling and transferring the data of the integrated circuits that make up the detector. The acquisition system is built around Xilinx Virtex 7 FPGA and Zynq SoC modules, it includes several 10 GB Ethernet links for data transfer to a server and onboard memories (DDR3, QDR) for local storage. There will be several specific acquisition modes to be implemented depending on the type of beamline experiment. The candidate will have to develop and organize the necessary tests and verification tools to validate the progress of his(her) work step by step. He (she) will iterate with the person in charge of the development of software libraries. Finally, the candidate will participate in the first laboratory tests of the complete acquisition chain. This step is essential in the preparation of the detector before the beamline experiment. Some trips may be necessary abroad. He (she) will report on design progress to the project leader and will present his results at a project follow-up meeting and possibly at a conference at the international level.
Profile:
II.Training and experience
The candidate must hold an engineering degree in digital electronics (or equivalent university degree) with 1 to 3 years of professional experience in embedded systems, FPGA programming and digital computing. Knowledge of FPGA tools as well as programming languages in C/C ++ and/or Python are also desired. Candidates must be fluent in English and a good level in French is also an advantage.
Applications have to be sent before 2020, March 15th