The TimBel synchronization board for time resolved experiments at synchrotron SOLEIL

Time resolved experiments are one of the major services that synchrotrons can provide to scientists. The short, high frequency and regular flashes of synchrotron light are a fantastic tool to study the evolution of phenomena over time. To carry out time resolved experiments, beamlines need to synchronize their devices with these flashes of light with a jitter shorter than the pulse duration. For that purpose, Synchrotron SOLEIL has developed the TimBeL (Timing Beamlines) board fully interfaced to TANGO framework. The TimBeL system is a compact PCI board. It is made of a mother with one daughter board. All functions are performed inside a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) implemented on the mother board. A PLX Technology chip is used to communicate with the compact PCI crate. To enable experiments to remain always synchronous with the same bunch of electrons, the storage ring clock (CLK-SR) and the radio frequency clock (CLK-RF) are provided by the machine to beamlines. These clocks are used inside the FPGA as main clocks for state machines. Because the jitter is too large on the FPGA outputs, a daughter board with a jitter cleaner has been added to the system. This board also provides delay lines for compensating time offsets by 10 ps steps. This paper presents the main features required by time resolved experiments and how we achieved our goals with the TimBeL board