Optical fibers help overcome data transfer obstacles

From Computing Bits, November 30, 2015

John Chramowicz and Jason Greskoviak in the lab with the POH testing equipment.

Written by Hannah Ward

If you have ever used your camera phone to capture important moments, you may have received the dreaded “Camera unable to take photo. Storage full” message. While frustrating, storage limitations are hardly disasters when it comes to camera phones, whereas a similar issue in a particle collision detector would mean missing hundreds of collisions for every second that “the storage” was full. At the same time, transferring photos from a phone to a storage device is relatively simple, but transferring data from a detector to a computer proves more difficult.

The Detector Electronics team in the Real-Time Systems Engineering department spent the last few years overcoming several obstacles regarding this data transfer process. Their current project, part of the CMS Phase 1 Upgrades, deals with transferring data from the CMS Forward Pixel (FPix) detector at CERN at a rate of 400 megabits per second (currently 40 mbps) on each of the 672 optical fibers. This project requires an increase in the number of detector channels and the implementation of a digital signaling format to replace the current analog format.

Read the full article in Computing Bits