| Paper | Title | Page |
|---|---|---|
| WEPMS011 | The Timing Master for the FAIR Accelerator Facility | 996 |
|
||
|
One central design feature of the FAIR accelerator complex is a high level of parallel beam operation, imposing ambitious demands on the timing and management of accelerator cycles. Several linear accelerators, synchrotrons, storage rings and beam lines have to be controlled and re-configured for each beam production chain on a pulse-to-pulse basis, with cycle lengths ranging from 20 ms to several hours. This implies initialization, synchronization of equipment on the time scale down to the ns level, interdependencies, multiple paths and contingency actions like emergency beam dump scenarios. The FAIR timing system will be based on White Rabbit [1] network technology, implementing a central Timing Master (TM) unit to orchestrate all machines. The TM is subdivided into separate functional blocks: the Clock Master, which deals with time and clock sources and their distribution over WR, the Management Master, which administrates all WR timing receivers, and the Data Master, which schedules and coordinates machine instructions and broadcasts them over the WR network. The TM triggers equipment actions based on the transmitted execution time. Since latencies in the low μs range are required, this paper investigates the possibilities of parallelisation in programmable hardware and discusses the benefits to either a distributed or monolithic timing master architecture. The proposed FPGA based TM will meet said timing requirements while providing fast reaction to interlocks and internal events and offers parallel processing of multiple signals and state machines.
[1] J. Serrano, et al, "The White Rabbit Project", ICALEPCS 2009. |
||