The 60+ Port Analog Telemetry Pipeline
More than sixty analog telemetry ports carry raw plasma and machine state out of the vessel into the acquisition chain, sampled below the microsecond.
The port budget
Both machines expose 60+ analog telemetry ports. A port is a physical, calibrated path from a sensor inside or on the machine, through a cryo-rated vacuum feedthrough, into a conditioning front end and a synchronized digitizer. The count is dominated by distributed arrays: Mirnov coil sets, multi-chord interferometry and Thomson scattering, flux-loop rings, REBCO strain gauges bonded across the high-field magnet set, ECE radiometer channels, fast-ion trackers, and neutron-flux monitors.
Analog first, deliberately
Signals leave the machine as analog voltages or currents because the physics is analog and the fastest transients — a Mirnov spike that precedes a disruption, a plug-density collapse in the mirror — cannot wait for in-vessel digitization. Analog transport preserves bandwidth to the digitizer, where a single disciplined clock timestamps every channel. This keeps cross-channel phase intact, which is what equilibrium reconstruction and MHD mode analysis depend on.
Breeder versus burner port mix
- Breeder (Hyperion): heavy on magnetics (Mirnov, flux loops) and REBCO strain because equilibrium at delta -0.30 and disruption avoidance are the hard control problems at 9.66 MA and 16.84 T peak field.
- Burner: heavy on end-plug and central-cell density diagnostics, potential probes for the ambipolar well, and the DEC train's grid and collector telemetry, plus 5.44%-neutron-fraction flux monitors.
From port to feature
Each port's stream is validated, spatially normalized, and folded into features. The pipeline is engineered so that adding or losing a port degrades gracefully: a graph model over the sensor topology can impute a dropped channel (see dead-sensor masking) rather than stall the loop. The port list, its calibrations, and its wiring are versioned in the schema registry so the fabric always knows exactly what is connected.
The pipeline is a design specification validated in simulation; the physical ports are engineered for the FOAK machine whose construction begins Q2 2027.