May 27 – 29, 2026
CERN
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Recovered Clock Phase Monitoring on AMD Transceivers for Deterministic Timing

May 29, 2026, 11:05 AM
25m
500/1-001 - Main Auditorium (CERN)

500/1-001 - Main Auditorium

CERN

400
Show room on map
Talk Solutions to everyday digital design problems Solutions to everyday digital design problems

Speaker

Nikitas Loukas (University of Notre Dame (US))

Description

After the Phase-II upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, pile-up discrimination in the CMS Electromagnetic Barrel Calorimeter demands a clock system with picosecond precision and deterministic phase. Although modern electronics can achieve sub-5 ps RMS jitter, widely used FPGAs do not ensure phase repeatability after reset. Their Multi-Gigabit Transceivers prioritize bit error rate robustness over deterministic recovered clock phase. Measurements with the Barrel Calorimeter Processor (BCP-V2) show that MGT resets can yield two discrete recovered clock phases about 10 ps apart, while the internal Delay Aligner adds temperature-dependent drift. The BCP-V2 integrates a picosecond-resolution monitor achitecture that extracts the clock before the Delay Aligner and the FPGA fabric (RXRECCLKOUT) and compares it to RXUSRCLK, typically used as the LHC reference, using a Digital Dual Mixer Time Difference method, enabling real-time detection of clock phase jumps and drifts.

Talk's Q&A During the talk
Talk duration 20'+10'
Will you be able to present in person? Yes
If we are unable to accommodate your oral presentation, would you be willing to consider presenting a poster instead? No

Author

Nikitas Loukas (University of Notre Dame (US))

Co-author

Stephen Goadhouse (University of Virginia (US))

Presentation materials