Student Project Cern GBT Aggregator

I study at the Institute for Entrepreneurship & Innovation at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. We are working on a project with CERN that is about a new technology of data aggregators and our first goal is to find potential fields of operation/application for this new technology.

That is why I would like to ask the users of similar products in which fields the current technology of data aggregators is used, what the benefits are and what other application fields you could think of.

For a better understanding of the GBT aggregator please read through the following short description:

The GBT (Gigabit Transceiver) will be implemented on a PCB (printed circuit board) similar to an AMC (Industriestandard) - (Advanced Mezzanine Card), which will be housed inside an ATCA Board (Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture Board). On the AMC will be a programmable FPGA (Prozessorchip) (Field Programmable Gate Array) where the firmware (algorithm) will be installed. The GBT will receive and send information over multiple 3.2 Gb/s links coming from the front-end system and over a single 40 Gb/s optical Ethernet link to a standard COTS (Components Of-The Shelf) Ethernet switch. A single GBT can therefore receive information from up to 12 3.2 Gb/s Ethernet links. The role of the GBT is to decode the incoming data, extract the readout, trigger and slowcontrol parts and send them ordered, along with a FEC (Forward Error Correction) code, to the ack-end system. The GBT works bidirectional and can therefore, at the same time, send TTC („Trigger, Timing & Command“) information back to the ront-end system. To have more capacity, multiple Aggregators will be used in one system, which don't necessarily have to be in one place though. Although the GBT will be developed with specific input protocols, it will be possible to use the platform for different applications along with different algorithms.

Please be assured that your contribution would be of significant value to our project. Thank you very much in advance for your help.

Best regards,

Paul

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