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EP-ESE Electronics Seminars
Serenity - From ATCA prototyping platform towards a final product
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Europe/Zurich
13/2-005 (CERN)
Description
The Serenity project started as an ATCA prototyping platform designed to explore alternative, novel design choices for CMS Phase-2 off-detector electronics, as well as providing a development platform for system firmware and software designers, using high-density, high-performance array connectors (Samtec z-ray) to mount one or more FPGAs onto the card, with the aim of adding flexibility and mitigating risk. Twenty Serenity blades are currently in "everyday use" and have been subjected to an extremely broad spectrum of testing, including
- Thermal testing within an ATCA shelf and comparison to simulations
- Signal integrity testing
- Brute-force BER testing in a "real-world" system
- Clock-distribution performance
- Accelerated-aging studies
as well as testing by collaborators. The results of all these tests will be presented.
To support the many different types and configurations of both FPGAs and optical modules supported by Serenity is non-trivial and has required the development of the "EMP" firmware framework, based on the successful "MP7" framework used at CMS Phase-1, so that it is now applicable to any Xilinx FPGA, and also a novel board-management software framework called "SMASH". Both "EMP" and "SMASH" are completely generic and have already found application beyond the Serenity ATCA blade.
A second revision of the board is currently being prototyped with the aim of reducing its complexity and to thus simplify manufacturing as we look towards installing HL-LHC scale systems, as well as increasing the board's flexibility and improving further its performance.
