Spectrum Instrumentation has been selected as a finalist in the Excellence in Product Design for High-Reliability Systems category at this year’s Elektra Awards. The high reliability of its products is evidenced by the many years of use from more than 140 Spectrum products in the machine protection systems of the European Organization for Nuclear Research's (CERN) Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The winners will be announced at the Awards ceremony that will be 
Source: CERNheld in London on December 5.
The cards deployed at the LHC check that the particle beams have been accurately deflected to dump their energy at the end of a collision run. Digitizer cards capture the current pulse waveforms to check that they had the correct shape and were correctly synchronized with the beam. The Spectrum arbitrary waveform generator cards also simulate kicker current waveforms, and Spectrum digital pattern generators cards send timing and control signals to help develop and validate surveillance and protection systems on test benches.
“We chose Spectrum Instrumentation products because they provide excellent quality at a very competitive price,” said Nicolas Magnin, software team leader for the accelerator beam transfer group at CERN. “They are very simple to set up with user-friendly software tools, and the driver sources are easy to compile and deploy on our Linux operational environment. I particularly appreciate the documentation and coding examples that are provided, which make it easy to get started. Their support was very quick with answers to our questions during the development phases.”
