Synchronization systems for high energy particle accelerators

Currently developed high energy particle accelerators require synchronization of their high frequency electronic subsystems with very high accuracy reaching 10 fs for short term and 1 ps for long term periods. Taking into account the accelerator size of many kilometers with thousands of synchronized devices and signal frequencies reaching 3.9 GHz, the design of the synchronization system for the accelerator is a very challenging task. This paper contains a short description of the most important design issues of the synchronization system.