WorldFIP is a fieldbus widely used at CERN; there are more than 10’000 WorldFIP nodes installed all around the LHC.
WorldFIP is used to connect critical sensors and actuators (by equipment groups like Power Converters, Cryogenics, Beam Instrumentation etc) with the control and supervision level.
The WorldFIP nodes are radiation-tolerant and are installed close the LHC magnets. The WorldFIP masters are always installed in radiation safe zones. One master is managing typically around 50 nodes.
The signal of the bus is 5V differential.

We used to purchase the WorldFIP masters and the nodes by the company Alstom. However Alstom has been gradually stopping all the WorldFIP support, as new Ethernet based solutions are now dominant.
At CERN we need to provide WorldFIP support until at least 2035, the end-of-life of the HL-LHC as it would be very costly to change all the cabling and the equipment to another radiation-tolerant solution.
The fact that there is no more WorldFIP support by Alstom is the main reason for the design and support our own WorldFIP equipment at CERN.
The migration of the all the 500 Alstom masters to the new masterFIP is targeted for the end of 2018, CERN’s Long Shutdown 2.

The project has been developed following the Functional Specifications and provides a complete replacement of the Alstom solution for CERN applications. It is divided into four sub-projects:

• Hardware : Mezzanine board schematic and layout, to be combined with a SPEC carrier
• Gateware : HDL design with Mock Turtle
• Software : Bare-metal C code running in the FPGA-embedded Mock Turtle CPUs, library and tools.
• Testing : Production and functional tests.

Contact