Speaker
Description
The LHCb experiment at CERN is undergoing R&D studies to prepare for operation in Run-5 at roughly five times the Run-3 (2022–2026) instantaneous luminosity. Several subdetectors will introduce precision timestamping, imposing stringent requirements on the distribution of the LHC synchronous clock to Front-End (FE) electronics. Specifically, the end-to-end clock phase uncertainty must be reduced by an order of magnitude relative to the current Run-3 system, improving from approximately 250 ps peak-to-peak to <= 50 ps in Run-4 (2030-2033) to <=10 ps in Run-5 (2036-2041).
This work presents a detailed description of the novel test suites needed to perform detailed characterizations of the timing distribution chain, enhancing automation, reproducibility and sample size. The current limitations have been analysed thoroughly and the results enabled the design of a novel and more robust clock-tree architecture that mitigates these effects. The proposed design achieves << 30 ps peak-to-peak clock phase uncertainty, validated through systematic measurements across all possible operational conditions, including reconfiguration, reprogramming and recompilations. The results demonstrate a viable path to meet future LHCb’s picosecond-level timing requirements for Run 4, while enabling high-precision timestamping in the upgraded detectors in view of a target of <=10ps precision for Run5.
| Minioral | Yes |
|---|---|
| IEEE Member | No |
| Are you a student? | No |