High speed fault tolerant secure communication for muon chamber using fpga based gbt emulator

TL;DR

This paper presents an FPGA-based GBT emulator for high-speed, fault-tolerant, and secure data transmission in high-energy physics experiments, specifically for the CBM experiment's muon detection system.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel FPGA-based GBT emulator implementing multi-bit error correction and integrated encryption for reliable, secure data transfer in radiation-prone environments.

Findings

Successful implementation of FPGA-based GBT emulator

Enhanced error correction with BCH code

Integrated AES and RSA encryption for security

Abstract

The Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment is a part of the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Darmstadt at the GSI. The CBM experiment will investigate the highly compressed nuclear matter using nucleus-nucleus collisions. This experiment will examine heavy-ion collisions in fixed target geometry and will be able to measure hadrons, electrons and muons. CBM requires precise time synchronization, compact hardware, radiation tolerance, self-triggered front-end electronics, efficient data aggregation schemes and capability to handle high data rate (up to several TB/s). As a part of the implementation of read out chain of MUCH in India, we have tried to implement FPGA based emulator of GBTx in India. GBTx is a radiation tolerant ASIC that can be used to implement multipurpose high speed bidirectional optical links for high-energy physics (HEP) experiments and is developed by CERN. GBTx will be used in highly irradiated area and more prone to be affected by multi bit error. To mitigate this effect instead of single bit error correcting RS code we have used two bit error correcting (15, 7) BCH code. It will increase the redundancy which in turn increases the reliability of the coded data. So the coded data will be less prone to be affected by noise due to radiation. Data will go from detector to PC through multiple nodes through the communication channel. In order to make the data communication secure, advanced encryption standard (AES - a symmetric key cryptography) and RSA (asymmetric key cryptography) are used after the channel coding.