Clock synchronization design and evaluation for trigger-less data acquisition system

For modern particle physics experiments, trigger-less data acquisition (DAQ) system has been put into practice because of the need of reaction multiplicity and trigger flexibility. In such new DAQ systems, global synchronized clock plays an important role because it affects the granularity of time slice and precision of reference clock. In this paper, a novel synchronized clock distribution method is proposed. With the help of modulation technique, master clock module distributes system clock to each slave module. To synchronize slave clocks, the propagation delay is adjusted and the clock phase is aligned by an FPGA chip automatically. Furthermore, an ADC- based method is proposed to evaluate the performance of multi-module clock synchronization simultaneously. The experiments of a prototype system show that slave clocks can be synchronized less than 100 ps over 150 m range. The proposed method is simple and flexible, and it can be used in trigger-less DAQ system and other applications of clock distribution preciously. (authors)