Performance Results of a Prototype Board Designed for Copper Data Transmission in KM3NeT

The experience gained in designing submarine neutrino telescopes suggests to explore new ways of realizing the data transmission backbone at the detection unit level for the KM3NeT project. In order to decrease the difficulties in integration and handling of the backbones, some effort has been spent in developing a backbone based on copper links with simple tracts of cable connecting contiguous storeys. This work is aimed at the presentation of the general architecture of the system, at the description of an electronic board prototype designed to test the project feasibility and the discussion of the first results obtained. The main goal of the experimental setup was measuring the recovered clock jitter under various conditions, with and without cables. The jitter measured on the cleaned clock amounts to hundreds of picoseconds, well below the sub-nanosecond time resolution required by this kind of experiments.