Speaker
Description
The European XFEL generates bursts of up to 2700 ultra-short x-ray flashes with a spacing of only 220 nanoseconds every 100 ms. These flashes are produced in the linear electron accelerator by undulators and guided 1 kilometer in vacuum pipes until they reach the scientific experiments. Accurate synchronization and the availability of information about all configurable pulses within a single burst, which can vary every 10 hertz cycle, enable the full potential of control, monitoring, and measurement in terms of accuracy and utilization. The MicroTCA-based timing system provides all the necessary capabilities. However, the industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs), which manage most of the control electronics of the beamlines and experiments, are only synchronized on a millisecond level through UART and NTP interfaces. This paper presents a new development based on an FPGA SoC EtherCAT solution in MicroTCA that implements an interface to the PLC using distributed clocks to achieve synchronization on microsecond
level and provide beam-related information in a deterministic manner.
| Minioral | Yes |
|---|---|
| IEEE Member | No |
| Are you a student? | No |