An overview of the ATCA® timing and synchronization resources for Control and Data Acquisition

Instruments for Control and Data Acquisition (CDAQ) require a pervasive embedded network able to provide accurate timing and synchronization signals to all digitalization/reconstruction devices and control processes of a CDAQ system. Typically, the industry trend is to adopt a well established computer instrumentation standard and complement it with adequate timing and synchronization resources for CDAQ. The Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (AdvancedTCA^®) standard appears to follow this tendency since extensions for timing and synchronization are currently being studied by the xTCA^© working group. This paper tries to help this effort by presenting an overview of the potential resources for timing and synchronization on AdvancedTCA^®, as well as a few implementation examples illustrating some of the technologies to consider.