Mukharbek Organokov
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Architecture and performance of the KM3NeT front-end firmware
2021, Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems
https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JATIS.7.1.016001
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Abstract
The KM3NeT infrastructure consists of two deep-sea neutrino telescopes being deployed in the Mediterranean Sea. The telescopes will detect extraterrestrial and atmospheric neutrinos by means of the incident photons induced by the passage of relativistic charged particles through the seawater as a consequence of a neutrino interaction. The telescopes are configured in a three-dimensional grid of digital optical modules, each hosting 31 photomultipliers. The photomultiplier signals produced by the incident Cherenkov photons are converted into digital information consisting of the integrated pulse duration and the time at which it surpasses a chosen threshold. The digitization is done by means of time to digital converters (TDCs) embedded in the field programmable gate array of the central logic board. Subsequently, a state machine formats the acquired data for its transmission to shore. We present the architecture and performance of the front-end firmware consisting of the TDCs and the state machine. © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.
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- David Calvo is a PhD candidate and research engineer at the Instituto de Física Corpuscular of Valencia. He received his MS degree in computing from the University Jaume I in 2006, his MS degree in electronics from the University of Valencia in 2009 and his MS degree in electronic systems design from the Polytechnic University of Valencia in 2012. His research interests are focused on digital electronics, synchronization, and readout acquisition systems. He is the author of several publications on electronics.
- Diego Real is a PhD in physics and research engineer at the Instituto de Física Corpuscular. He received his BS degree in electronics in 1997 and his MS degree in control and electronics in 2000, both from the Polytechnic University of Valencia. He is the author of several publications on electronics. His current research interests include acquisition and synchronization systems for particle physics. He has been the electronics project leader of the KM3NeT telescope and member of the technical advisory board of the GVD-Baikal telescope since 2013. Biographies of the other authors are not available.