Implementation and performances of the IPbus protocol for the JUNO Large-PMT readout electronics

TL;DR

This paper details the implementation and performance evaluation of the IPbus protocol used in JUNO's large-PMT readout electronics, ensuring reliable, high-speed data acquisition for a long-term neutrino detection experiment.

Contribution

It presents the hardware and firmware implementation of the IPbus protocol tailored for JUNO's large-PMT electronics, with performance results from mass production testing.

Findings

Successful hardware and firmware deployment of IPbus protocol.

High-speed, reliable data transfer demonstrated during testing.

Electronics capable of long-term underwater operation.

Abstract

The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is a large neutrino detector currently under construction in China. Thanks to the tight requirements on its optical and radio-purity properties, it will be able to perform leading measurements detecting terrestrial and astrophysical neutrinos in a wide energy range from tens of keV to hundreds of MeV. A key requirement for the success of the experiment is an unprecedented 3% energy resolution, guaranteed by its large active mass (20 kton) and the use of more than 20,000 20-inch photo-multiplier tubes (PMTs) acquired by high-speed, high-resolution sampling electronics located very close to the PMTs. As the Front-End and Read-Out electronics is expected to continuously run underwater for 30 years, a reliable readout acquisition system capable of handling the timestamped data stream coming from the Large-PMTs and permitting to simultaneously monitor and operate remotely the inaccessible electronics had to be developed. In this contribution, the firmware and hardware implementation of the IPbus based readout protocol will be presented, together with the performances measured on final modules during the mass production of the electronics.