A readout system-on-chip for a cubic kilometer submarine neutrino telescope

Abstract

This contribution reports on the read-out system of the future KM3NeT undersea network of several thousands of synchronized optical detecting nodes. Each node embeds a specifically designed fully integrated communicating system based on Xilinx FPGA SoC technology. It runs the VxWorks real-time OS and DAQ software designed within the Ice middleware framework resulting in a highly flexible, controllable and scalable distributed application. Clock distribution and delay calibration over customized fixed latency gigabit Ethernet links enable synchronous time stamping of events with nanosecond precision.