The denarius of Marcus Junius Brutus, commemorating the Ides of March, can be placed among the coins most established in the collective imagination of ancient societies and, later, among those having the greatest impact on European humanism. One cannot point out another antique coin that refers directly to such a fateful historical event as the assassination of Julius Caesar. Respublica liberata, the work by Andreas Alciatus (1492–1550), printed in 1546, is outstanding among numerous, ancient and modern examples of the reception of Brutus’s coin. Alciatus, a famous Milanese lawyer, composed his work in the innovative form of an emblematic study. Emblematics enjoyed great popularity throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Symbols and allegorical representations were used as a universal media for describing the world. The distinguishing representation of daggers and pileus – according to the general idea of emblems – had been separated by Alciatus from its historical context and given a universal and ageless meaning. In this manner, the writer made the ancient iconographical type the general symbol of the liberation of a state from the rule of a tyrant.
The work presents a structural and functional model of a distributed low level radio frequency (LLRF) control, diagnostic and telemetric system for a large industrial object. An example of system implementation is the European TESLA-XFEL accelerator. The free electron laser is expected to work in the VUV region now and in the range of X-rays in the future. The design of a system based on the FPGA circuits and multi-gigabit optical network is discussed. The system design approach is fully parametric. The major emphasis is put on the methods of the functional and hardware concentration to use fully both: a very big transmission capacity of the optical fiber telemetric channels and very big processing power of the latest series of DSP/PC enhanced and optical I/O equipped, FPGA chips. The subject of the work is the design of a universal, laboratory module of the LLRF sub-system. The current parameters of the system model, under the design, are presented. The considerations are shown on the background of the system application in the hostile industrial environment. The work is a digest of a few development threads of the hybrid, optoelectronic, telemetric networks (HOTN). In particular, the outline of construction theory of HOTN node was presented as well as the technology of complex, modular, multilayer HOTN system PCBs. The PCBs contain critical sub-systems of the node and the network. The presented exemplary sub-systems are: fast optical data transmission of 2.5 Gbit/s, 3.125 Gbit/s and 10 Gbit/s; fast A/C and C/A multichannel data conversion managed by FPGA chip (40 MHz, 65 MHz, 105 MHz), data and functionality concentration, integration of floating point calculations in the DSP units of FPGA circuit, using now discrete and next integrated PC chip with embedded OS; optical distributed timing system of phase reference; and 1GbEth video interface (over UTP or FX) for CCD telemetry and monitoring. The data and functions concentration in the HOTN node is necessary to make efficient use of the multigigabit optical fiber transmission and increasing the processing power of the FPGA/DSP/PC chips with optical I/O interfaces. The experiences with the development of the new generation of HOTN node based on the new technologies of data and functions concentration are extremely promising, because such systems are less expensive and require less labour.