High-precision technology developed for the SKAO finds applications in other industries
The new hardware, which builds on White Rabbit network technology first developed for CERN, was initially developed by the University of Granada and Spanish company Seven Solutions, since acquired by multinational aerospace company Safran. It is now a component of Safran’s Navigation and Timing solutions and was developed at their site in Granada, Spain.
White Rabbit networks allow the synchronisation of remote devices over long distances with sub-nanosecond accuracy. Thousands of nodes can be connected and gigabits of data transferred. This makes them ideally suited for the SKA telescopes, where hundreds of dishes spread over 150 km, and low frequency stations spread over 74 km, need to be synchronised with a high degree of precision to conduct complex observations.
Participating in this groundbreaking international project offers a unique opportunity to demonstrate the critical role of high-precision synchronisation in distributed systems like the SKA telescopes.
Safran Electronics & Defense has now been contracted by the SKA Observatory to provide more than 200 of the devices. To support this, the team has taken on more staff and established new technical training programmes. To provide the sub-nanosecond accuracy performance, new cutting-edge calibration techniques had to be adopted, growing the skill set of the team.
The system’s master unit distributes an accurate time signal to each of the SKA-Mid dishes and SKA-Low’s remote processing facilities (RPFs) via optical fibre. The White Rabbit solution compensates for any distortions in the fibre due to environmental effects along the way, and the digitised data produced at each dish and RPF is then stamped with an accurate time, so it can be synchronised precisely.
The work has now found applications on the international market in sectors including aerospace, financial technology, and smart grids.
