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    by Dr Alexander Howard (Imperial College (GB)), Jeroen Hegeman (CERN), Mei-Li Holmberg (University of Bristol), Dr Paolo Durante (CERN)

    → Europe/Zurich
    593/R-010 - Salle 11 (CERN)

    593/R-010 - Salle 11

    CERN

    50
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    Description

    Abstract

    Digital optical links are prevalent in system architectures that require high-throughput and distributed processing capabilities. This course will give an overview of the technology, its features, operating characteristics and different features that are currently on the market. We will also consider practical aspects and requirements for deployment in large scale systems. We are developing boards which are capable of individually processing >3 Tbits/s, for a system which will deploy nearly 1000 boards and off-load 50Tb/s through multiple processing stages. Data from front-end electronics, through to intermediate processing and back-end event selection will be handled by our high-end FPGA-based cards.

    The second lecture will cover specifically the testing and validation of optical components as used on dedicated FPGA based data processing boards. An overview of the Serenity processing board being developed the forthcoming CMS upgrade will be presented. Design, testing and validation in preparation of the full system will be discussed. Specific emphasis will be made on the measurement of optical "eye" and "bathtub" scans as a method of determining device performance and its predicted behaviour and robustness when deployed across a large scale system processing large amounts of data with fixed (low) latency and with high accuracy. Due to the nature of the data flow integrity, reliability at high speeds are paramount.

    The lectures will be followed up by a day long pracitical exercise which will involve investigating optical links and their quality on a dedicated uTCA FPGA DAQ board. There will also be a hands-on exploration of direct optical measurements using a high speed (50GHz) optical sampling scope and a comparison between the two systems and measurement methodologies made.

    Lecturer Bio

    Alexander Howard studied Physics at Imperial College and completed his PhD on the first development of Diamond Detectors for particle physics. Since then he has worked at Imperial College, CERN and ETHZ on liquid xenon Dark Matter searches, neutron detectors for homeland security, a cosmic ray balloon experiment, an X-ray imager on the solar orbiter and has been a Geant4 developer for the last 25 years. Since 2018 he has been a researcher at Imperial College working on the development of the SERENITY general purpose DAQ board for the CMS experiment, with particular emphasis on the testing, validation and verification of the on-board high speed (25Gbps) optical links.

    Tutor's Bio

    Mei-Li Holmberg is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, working on the CMS Outer Tracker Upgrade. She began her career in experimental particle physics in 2018 with a Master’s Thesis at KTH on Low Gain Avalanche Detectors for the ATLAS experiment. She later completed a PhD at the University of Bristol, focusing on Tracker readout development for the CMS upgrade and a search for light Higgs bosons from SUSY decay cascades, which involved work on optical transceivers and high-speed links. Today, she remains involved in testing hardware and firmware, as well as writing software for the outer tracker backend systems.