The Global Control Unit for the JUNO Front-End Electronics

Abstract

At the core of the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) front-end and readout electronics is the Global Control Unit (GCU), a custom and low power hardware platform with intelligence on-board which is able to perform several different tasks spanning from selective readout and transmission as well as remote peripherals control. The hardware inaccessibility after installation, the timing resolution and synchronization among channels, the trigger generation and data buffering, the supernova events data storage, the data readout bandwidth requirements are all key factors that are reflected in the GCU architecture. The main logic of the GCU is in an FPGA that interfaces with a custom made ASIC that continuously digitizes the signal from the photomultiplier tube (PMT). The paper gives an overview of the main GCU functionalities and state of art of the project.