The PRIZM® LightTurn® connector provides passive alignment and novel retention features allowing multiple re-mattings perpendicular to the PCB. The connector consists of a multi-fiber ferrule with a photonic turn TIR (total internal reflection) lens array. This provides excellent coupling to high bandwidth mini-parallel optic AVAGO modules.

Real application – The CMS experiment¹

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is a general purpose detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) performing searches for new physics and tests of the current best model of Universe, the Standard Model. Huge technological challenges are faced in isolating events of interest from the large amount of background processes and in their subsequent reconstruction. The LHC collides protons at a rate of 40 MHz however rare events, such as those containing the Higgs boson, occur far less frequently. It is infeasible to retain every event as this would require an output data rate of > 5000 Tb/s, far exceeding current technological capabilities. To ensure that these rare events are extracted from the large volume of background processes, CMS utilises a sophisticated two-tier trigger system, performing a fast event reconstruction before deciding whether to retain the event or lose it forever. The first layer of the trigger system, the Level-1 (L1) Trigger, must be incredibly fast in performing these tasks which much be achieved in millionths of a second and is hence performed by high-performance custom-built electronics.

New Card development – Master Processor 7²

To be able to detect the above mentioned events of the CMS experiment, new card has to be developed.

The Imperial Master Processor, Virtex-7 (MP7) is a high-performance all-optical, datastream processor designed to operate in the challenging conditions of the CMS trigger system at the LHC. Utilising the high performance Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA and state-of-the-art fibre optics technologies, the MP7 has the capability to input and output data at a rate of 3/4 Tbit per second, equivalent to the mean global traffic of the entire Internet in 2001. These features are crucial in the operation of the trigger at the LHC where a latency budget of 3.2μs is afforded to readout and process the large volume of data from the detector subsystems, equivalent to processing data at a rate of up to 10 Tbits per second. The MP7 is the baseline trigger processor board for the CMS calorimeter trigger upgrade, whose capabilities are expected to achieve an improvement in the physics performance of the CMS detector under the more challenging full-energy and highluminosity conditions that will be experienced in the upgraded LHC beam.

Specifications of used Optical components
Optical Transceivers³