Author: Serrano, J.
Paper Title Page
WEC3O01 Trigger and RF Distribution Using White Rabbit 619
 
  • T. Włostowski, G. Daniluk, M.M. Lipinski, J. Serrano
    CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
  • F. Vaga
    University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy
  
  White Rab­bit is an ex­ten­sion of Eth­er­net which al­lows re­mote syn­chro­niza­tion of nodes with jit­ters of around 10ps. The tech­nol­ogy can be used for a va­ri­ety of pur­poses. This paper pre­sents a fixed-la­tency trig­ger dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem for the study of in­sta­bil­i­ties in the LHC. Fixed la­tency is achieved by pre­cisely time-stamp­ing in­com­ing trig­gers, no­ti­fy­ing other nodes via an Eth­er­net broad­cast con­tain­ing these time stamps and hav­ing these nodes pro­duce pulses at well-de­fined time off­sets. The same sys­tem is used to dis­trib­ute the 89us LHC rev­o­lu­tion tick. This paper also de­scribes cur­rent ef­forts for dis­trib­ut­ing mul­ti­ple RF sig­nals over a WR net­work, using a Dis­trib­uted DDS par­a­digm.  
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THHA2I01 Developing Distributed Hard-Real Time Software Systems Using FPGAs and Soft Cores 1073
 
  • T. Włostowski, J. Serrano
    CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
  • F. Vaga
    University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy
  
  Hard real-time sys­tems guar­an­tee by de­sign that no dead­line is ever missed. In a dis­trib­uted en­vi­ron­ment such as par­ti­cle ac­cel­er­a­tors, there is often the extra re­quire­ment of hav­ing di­verse real-time sys­tems syn­chro­nize to each other. Im­ple­men­ta­tions on top of gen­eral-pur­pose multi-task­ing op­er­at­ing sys­tems such as Linux gen­er­ally suf­fer from lack of full con­trol of the plat­form. On the other hand, so­lu­tions based on logic in­side FPGAs can re­sult in long de­vel­op­ment cy­cles. A mid-way ap­proach is pre­sented which al­lows fast soft­ware de­vel­op­ment yet guar­an­tees full con­trol of the tim­ing of the ex­e­cu­tion. The so­lu­tion in­volves using soft cores in­side FPGAs, run­ning sin­gle tasks with­out in­ter­rupts and with­out an op­er­at­ing sys­tem un­der­neath. Two CERN de­vel­op­ments are pre­sented, both based on a unique free and open source HDL core com­pris­ing a pa­ra­me­ter­i­z­able num­ber of CPUs, logic to syn­chro­nize them and mes­sage queues to com­mu­ni­cate with the local host and with re­mote sys­tems. This de­vel­op­ment en­vi­ron­ment is being of­fered as a ser­vice to fill the gap be­tween Linux-based so­lu­tions and full-hard­ware im­ple­men­ta­tions.  
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THD3O07
 Free Software Tools for Hardware Development  
 
  • J. Serrano
    CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
  
  Shar­ing hard­ware de­signs is dif­fi­cult be­cause the mar­ket for Elec­tronic De­sign Au­toma­tion (EDA) tools is frag­mented and mostly dom­i­nated by pro­pri­etary tools with in­com­pat­i­ble for­mats. The work­shop ex­plores the cur­rent land­scape of free soft­ware tools for EDA, with an em­pha­sis on KiCad, an ap­pli­ca­tion for Printed Cir­cuit Board (PCB) de­sign. We will de­sign a com­plete PCB from scratch using KiCad. If time al­lows and there is enough in­ter­est, we will also look at tools for Hard­ware De­scrip­tion Lan­guage (HDL) sim­u­la­tion and SPICE or SPICE-like ana­log sim­u­la­tion of cir­cuits.  
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