News

White Rabbit

17-12-2013: WR link between CERN sites for test purposes

We have recently managed to get a fiber link deployed between the two CERN sites: Prevessin (France) and Meyrin (Switzerland). It goes from our lab to the CERN Control Center, then under the border to building near the CERN Globe of Science and Innovation and back the same way to our lab. It is a real fiber installation of about 9 km length in total. We will use it for long term tests of White Rabbit. Since it’s no longer a roll of fiber in the lab, we can check for example the stability of tracking the link changes due to temperature variations over days, weeks and even months.

White Rabbit

06-11-2013: WR goes to see the galaxy

Martin Bruckner and Ralf Wischnewski from DESY has presented at the 33rd International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC2013) several articles describing a White Rabbit setup used for the HiSCORE-Tunka detector. This HiSCORE detector, a new non-imaging wide-angle Air-Cherenkov ground based array, is currently in its engineering phase. Time synchronization to nsec-level between detector stations, distributed over 10-100km2, is essential to reach best angular resolution for high energy gamma rays.

White Rabbit

23-10-2013: First WR project newsletter published

The first WR project newsletter has been published. The newsletter is made of voluntary contributions from people who are developing or using WR technology. The style is informal and aims at giving a quick snapshot of where the project is and where it’s heading.

White Rabbit

16-08-2013: 1000 km link transfers UTC(MIKES)

The 1000 km White Rabbit link under test by MIKES and CSC (that operates FUNET) in Finland is actually quite a system as Mr. Merimaa from MIKES explains:

The WR-master is actually referenced to UTC (MIKE), so that we have (some kind of) representation of UTC (MIKE) in Kajaani even now! And not just a second, but the time of day as well.

White Rabbit

15-08-2013: A 1000 km link up and running

The Finnish Metrology Institute MIKES has set up a White Rabbit link between two PCs that are connected with a 1000 (one thousand!) kilometer link. This work is a collaboration between MIKES and CSC - IT Center for Science Ltd that operates FUNET (the Finnish University Network.

White Rabbit

14-08-2013: WR running on official Dutch national timescale

The Dutch Metrology Institute VSL has set up their first White Rabbit link running between two PCs.
The GrandMaster PC is now synchronized to the Dutch national timescale and the Slave PC is synchronized to the GrandMaster over a 5 km fiber spool. On the slave, one connector is defined as output 1PPS. This signal is compared back to the timescale with a time interval counter. The experiment is now set up that the counter will automatically measure the difference every 30 minutes. VSL will let this run for some time to observe the stability of this link.

White Rabbit Switch - Software

wr-switch-sw, release 3.3

We are happy to announce that we have v3.3 of WR Switch firmware
released. We chose to jump from v3.1 ro v3.3 in order to match
the hardware releases – but this software package works on both 3.2 and 3.3
hardwareof the box.

White Rabbit

11-07-2013: WR based TDC system demonstrated in China

Our friends in Tsinghua University demonstrated a distributed time-stamping system with sub-ns accuracy. You can see a video at http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNTc2MDc5ODA4.html

FMC DEL 1ns 4cha

Hardware and VHDL design notes published

An engineer-to-engineer note describing the hardware and VHDL design of the Fine Delay has been published. It provides a lot of information on the internals of the FD card, calibration techniques, White Rabbit implementation, Acam’s TDC and programming the card’s registers.