  In applications with segmented high purity Ge detectors or other detector
arrays with tens or hundreds of channels, where the high development cost and
limited flexibility of application specific integrated circuits outweigh their
benefits of low power and small size, the readout electronics typically consist
of multi-channel data acquisition modules in a common chassis for power, clock
and trigger distribution, and data readout. As arrays become larger and reach
several hundred channels, the readout electronics have to be divided over
several chassis, but still must maintain precise synchronization of clocks and
trigger signals across all channels. This division becomes necessary not only
because of limits given by the instrumentation standards on module size and
chassis slot numbers, but also because data readout times increase when more
modules share the same data bus and because power requirements approach the
limits of readily available power supplies. In this paper, we present a method
for distributing clocks and triggers between 4 PXI chassis containing DGF
Pixie-16 modules with up to 226 acquisition channels per chassis in a data
acquisition system intended to instrument the over 600 channels of the SeGA
detector array at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory. Our
solution is designed to achieve synchronous acquisition of detector waveforms
from all channels with a jitter of less then 1 ns, and can be extended to a
larger number of chassis if desired.
