A JESD204B-compliant architecture for remote and deterministic-latency operation

High-speed analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are key components in a huge variety of systems, including trigger and data acquisition (TDAQ) systems of Nuclear and Sub-nuclear Physics experiments. Over the last decades, the sample rate and dynamic range of high-speed ADCs underwent a continuous growth and it required the development of suitable interface protocols, such as the new JESD204B serial interface protocol. In this work, we present an original JESD204B-compliant architecture we designed, which is able to operate an analog-to-digital converter in a remote fashion. Our design includes a deterministic-latency high-speed serial link, which is the only connection between the local and remote logic of the architecture and which preserves the deterministic timing features of the protocol. By means of our solution it is possible to read data out of several converters, even remote to each other, and keep them operating synchronously. Our link also supports forward error correction (FEC) capabilities, in the view of the operation in radiation areas (e.g. on-detector in TDAQ systems). We discuss an implementation of our concept in a latest generation FPGA (Xilinx Kintex-7 325T), its logic footprint, frequency performance and power consumption. We present measurements of the timing jitter and latency stability of JESD204B timing-critical signals forwarded over the link. We also describe a demo application of our architecture.