1.

High Voltage Pulse Modulator for Klystron based RF LINACs

2. FPGA based controller for controlling and monitoring of LINAC and its auxiliary
subsystems.
3. Challenges in upgradation from manual operating console to computerised console
4. Problems in Digitization of monitoring signals representing VAC,DOSE and PRF etc
a. Results
b. EMI/EMC results too.
5. Conclusion in terms of efficiency further insight into the upgradation of auxialry
subsystem to be compatible with controller. Solutions???





















Criticality in Upgrading to Computerised Control & Monitoring
System (CMS) for Medical Linear Accelerator
Sandesh R.Bhat
1
, R.Sandeep Kumar
2
, Mandar Vidwans
3
, Kiran A. Takur
4
, S.N.Pethe
5
, R.Krishnan
6
Society for Applied Microwave Electronics Engineering & Research (SAMEER), IIT Campus, Powai
Mumbai, India

Introduction:
Medical linacs are cyclic accelerators that accelerate electrons to kinetic energies
from 4 to 25 MeV using non-conservative microwave RF fields in the frequency range from

MHz (L band) to

MHz (X band). At SAMEER LINACs are operated in S-Band at

operating frequency of 2998MHz and presently developing modern high energy linac which
will provide two photon energies (6 and 18 MV) and several electron energies (6, 9, 12 and
18 MeV). In a linac the electrons are accelerated following straight trajectories in special
evacuated structures called accelerating waveguides. The high power RF fields used for
electron acceleration in the accelerating waveguides are produced through the process of
decelerating electrons in retarding potentials in special evacuated devices called magnetrons
and klystrons [karzmark book].
Klystron requires high voltage bias pulses for its operation and is provided by high
voltage pulse generator, also called as Modulator. Modulator provides 12 KV voltage pulses
of 6s duration with repetition frequencies ranging from 20 Hz to 270 Hz. These pulses are
applied to a pulse transformer with a turn ratio of 1:11. The secondary of the pulse
transformer produces the voltage pulses of 120 KV of 6s duration that produces a current of
100 A when applied across the Klystron. These specifications match to the requirement of
Klystron used at operating frequency of 2998 MHz. The topology of Modulator being
implemented is conventional Line-Type Modulator which employs sub-resonant mode of
charging a pulse forming network (PFN). The PFN is discharged through a Thyratron switch
to the primary of the pulse transformer. In perspective of present paper authors would like to
highlight the extents of noise generated by Modulator. The main sources of noise generation
in Modulator are high voltage rectifier diodes, Thyratron triggering and high levels of
transients that occur during the switching. The system is designed to switch the output
voltage of modulator to 12 KV with in 700 ns.

A hardware controller was designed to control and monitor the signals from LINAC
and its auxiliary subsystems. Controller mainly monitors various interlocks that are to be
cleared before switching ON high power pulse from the modulator. Many of these interlocks
are directly generated and few are generated by monitoring the current from the Vacuum
pump supply, current through the klystron solenoids etc. by the controller. These interlocks
are daisy chained through the relays in the power distribution section of the modulator. The
occurrence of interlock faults is detected by electronic circuitry and generation of high power
pulse to the klystron is stopped. The controller helps in controlling the amount and time of
dose delivery as well as monitors the elapsed dose and the elapsed time. On completion of
dose or the time the high power pulse is Switched OFF thereby switching off the generation
of X-ray.


Fig.1. Block diagram of LINAC and its Control System
Modern day Control and Monitoring System (CMS) requires lot of backend systems
like database for storage of machine data log, patient log, graphical user interface (GUI),
along with the principal objective of controlling the LINAC. Fig.1. shows the block diagram
of LINAC and its control system. CMS has to communicate with various other systems in the
network to access the parameters for operating the LINAC. Parameters are then validated by
the CMS and further communicated to the LINAC controller for delivery of dose. LINAC
controller commands the various subsystems to set according to the received parameters and
acknowledges back the status to the CMS. The currents from Vacuum Pump, Klystron
solenoid and many other analog are digitized using ADCs and communicated to CMS. The
important interlocks from the modulator are isolated at the controller before being read by the
FPGA for processing on which the glue logic is implemented.

Inorder to synchronize operation of all the systems of LINAC Modulator contains a UJT
relaxation based trigger generator circuit. This is the master time source for operating LINAC
and its subsystems. The trigger generator circuit provides 250 V trigger pulses which are
applied to Thyratron grid after stepping up to 1 KV. These 250 V trigger pulses are generated
by firing the gate of a silicon controlled rectifier (SCR) in coherence with the PRF pulses. As
is already mentioned whence the Thyratron gets fired it will switch high current in a small
time causing generation of heavy transients. A study has been to observe the extent of
transients that might result due to this high rate of change of current and its effect on the low
voltage control circuitry. The observed noise is coupled in many ways (reference of
EMI/EMC basic) to other controller circuitry and may affect its operation.
Present paper reports the observed noise signals and discusses their probable origin.
Further efforts are being made to reduce these interferences on the control circuitry.

Results:
Fig.2 shows the waveforms observed at the gate of SCR of Trigger generator circuit. Ideally
SCR requires a pulse of 0.7 to 1 V at the gate terminal to drive it into ON-state. The observed
waveform in ideal conditions without applying high voltage on PFN is a pulse of 0.9 V and
0.5 ms duration. As the Thyratron is fired to trigger the voltage on PFN to the Klystron the
waveform gets superposed with the noise generated.

The noise levels are of 160 Vp-p of frequency greater than 20 MHz. Due to such high levels
the traces of original trigger signal at gate of SCR is wiped off. It is interesting to note that
the operation of trigger generator circuit is unaffected due to the slow response of used SCR.
At the same time this affects the reliability of the system by increasing the chances of
unexpected failure and burning out the sensitive and costly components. Inorder to have a
quantitative estimation of observed transient noise the signals at various stages of LINAC are
observed. Fig.2. shows the high voltage pulse observed at the secondary of the pulse
transformer across Klystron. A very fast varying noise signal is observed during the rise time
of the voltage pulse. This noise signal is replica of the waveform observed in Fig.1 with
increased amplitudes. This noise in the voltage pulse of klystron reduces the usable pulse
width for RF power generation from Klystron and reduces the efficiency of the system there
by increasing the length of accelerating wave guide structure or input power at larger PRFs
for achieving the required dose.


The observations at the LINAC Controller end showed frequent unexpected states and
erroneous results. Few of such observations are flickering of the interlocks on the CMS,
Variations in the monitored input signals led to the generation of onboard pseudo interlocks
that are detected by FPGA to stop the high power pulse generation and most important
parameter i.e. dose count was observed to be non-zero. All these being critical parameters of
the LINAC operation, if superposed with errors may lead to improper dose delivery to cancer
patients and also affect the operation of LINAC.
To infer reasons for above mentioned observations of LINAC controller the signal
integrity is evaluated by connecting output of high power pulse generator to the resistive load
of 12.5 ohm.
To emulate the signal generated by the vacuum pump supply a DC voltage signal of
2V amplitude is applied from a regulated DC power supply (Aplab) to the ADC input of the
LINAC Controller. Fig.5 shows the observed signals on the MSO (Lecroy) at the ADC input
pin. It can be observed that the DC voltage signal is superposed with spikes at regular
intervals of time domain. From observed pattern of spike signals their origin is inferred to be
from the transient noise generated while thyratron is fired.

Fig.5.
Fig.6 shows the zoomed view of the observed spike signals. The signal is not in
complete agreement with the noise signal shown in fig.1 rather a positive or negative going
pulse of 3us is recorded. To investigate the discrepancy in the above observed results, AC
analysis is performed on the input section of ADC consisting the filter & buffer stage using
MULTISIM. The simulated results show a sharp resonant peak at 1.6 kHz that corresponds to
the time period of ~0.6msec which matches with the ideal gate pulse of SCR in the trigger
generator circuit shown in fig.1.

Fig. 6the
The filtering stage of ADC is designed to filter out the high frequency components but
the frequency from 1kHz to 2kHz which are close to the resonant peak gets coupled to the
further stages with increasing amplitude. This shows that the ADC input stage acts as an
envelope detector and is responsible for the spike signal observed in fig. 6 i.e. the envelop of
the noise signal shown in fig. 1. These spike signals are further digitised by the ADC causing
the variation in monitored signal probing the FPGA to generate pseudo interlocks. Fig.7
shows the noise on monitoring signal provided by the vacuum pump power supply observed
in MSO in ac coupling mode when the high power pulse generator is operated with Klystron
as load and its zoomed view.

Fig.7
Thyratron is fired at intervals set by PRF of the Modulator, causing the transient noise
to repeat at the same frequency. From the above mentioned results it is to be noted that this
gets coupled to various stages of Modulator and also to the connected subsystems noise
whose levels are comparable to their functioning levels. Similar such noise signals coupled at
the dosimetry input section of the LINAC controller which constitutes a voltage to frequency
converter providing non-zero dose counts even if the X-ray is not switched ON.
Conclusion: