Implementing the GBT Data Transmission Protocol in FPGAs

International audienceThe GBT chip is a radiation tolerant ASIC that can be used to implement bidirectional multipurpose 4.8 Gb/s optical links for high-energy physics experiments. It will be proposed to the LHC experiments for combined transmission of physics data, trigger, timing, fast and slow control and monitoring. Although radiation hardness is required on detectors, it is not necessary for the electronics located in the counting rooms. Therefore, a study is being made to implement these GBT links on FPGAs. This paper will describe the GBT protocol implementation, the configuration of the transceivers on Altera Stratix II GX and Xilinx Virtex 4, the optimization of resource for multi-transceivers, the first data transmission tests and the source code availabilit