Distributed Real Time Input/Output (DRTIO)

DRTIO is a time and data transfer system that allows ARTIQ RTIO channels to be distributed among several satellite devices synchronized and controlled by a central core device.

The link is a high speed duplex serial line operating at 1Gbps or more, over copper or optical fiber.

The main source of DRTIO traffic is the remote control of RTIO output and input channels. The protocol is optimized to maximize throughput and minimize latency, and handles flow control and error conditions (underflows, overflows, etc.)

The DRTIO protocol also supports auxiliary, low-priority and non-realtime traffic. The auxiliary channel supports overriding and monitoring TTL I/Os. Auxiliary traffic never interrupts or delays the main traffic, so that it cannot cause unexpected poor performance (e.g. RTIO underflows).

Time transfer and clock syntonization is typically done over the serial link alone. The DRTIO code is organized as much as possible to support porting to different types of transceivers (Xilinx MGTs, Altera MGTs, soft transceivers running off regular FPGA IOs, etc.) and different synchronization mechanisms.

The lower layers of DRTIO are similar to White Rabbit, with the following main differences:

• lower latency
• deterministic latency
• real-time/auxiliary channels
• higher bandwidth
• no Ethernet compatibility
• only star or tree topologies are supported

From ARTIQ kernels, DRTIO channels are used in the same way as local RTIO channels.

Using DRTIO

Remote RTIO channels are accessed in the same was as local ones. Bits 16-24 of the RTIO channel number are used to select between local RTIO channels or one of the connected DRTIO satellites. Bits 0-15 of the RTIO channel number select the channel within one device (local or remote).

This scheme will be expanded later with the introduction of DRTIO switches.

Internal details

Real-time and auxiliary packets

DRTIO is a packet-based protocol that uses two types of packets:

• real-time packets, which are transmitted at high priority at a high bandwidth and are used for the bulk of RTIO commands and data. In the ARTIQ DRTIO implementation, real-time packets are processed entirely in gateware.
• auxiliary packets, which are lower-bandwidth and are used for ancilliary tasks such as housekeeping and monitoring/injection. Auxiliary packets are low-priority and their transmission has no impact on the timing of real-time packets (however, transmission of real-time packets slows down the transmission of auxiliary packets). In the ARTIQ DRTIO implementation, the contents of the auxiliary packets are read and written directly by the firmware, with the gateware simply handling the transmission of the raw data.

Link layer

The lower layer of the DRTIO protocol stack is the link layer, which is responsible for delimiting real-time and auxiliary packets, and assisting with the establishment of a fixed-latency high speed serial transceiver link.

DRTIO uses the IBM (Widmer and Franaszek) 8b/10b encoding. The two types of 8b/10b codes are used: D characters, that always transmit real-time packet data, and K characters, that are used for idling and transmitting auxiliary packet data.

At every logic clock cycle, the high-speed transceiver hardware transmits some amount N of 8b/10b characters (typically, N is 2 or 4) and receives the same amount. With DRTIO, those characters must be all of the D type or all of the K type; mixing D and K characters in the same logic clock cycle is not allowed.

A real-time packet is defined by a series of D characters containing the packet’s payload, delimited by at least one K character. Real-time packets must be padded to satisfy the requirement that only D or only K characters are transmitted during a logic clock cycle, by making their length a multiple of N.

K characters, which are transmitted whenever there is no real-time data to transmit and to delimit real-time packets, are chosen using a 3-bit K selection word. If this K character is the first character in the set of N characters processed by the transceiver in the logic clock cycle, the mapping between the K selection word and the 8b/10b K space contains commas. If the K character is any of the subsequent characters processed by the transceiver, a different mapping is used that does not contain any commas. This scheme allows the receiver to align its logic clock with that of the transmitter, simply by shifting its logic clock so that commas are received into the first character position.

Note

Due to the shoddy design of transceiver hardware, this simple process of clock and comma alignment is difficult to perform in practice. The paper “High-speed, fixed-latency serial links with Xilinx FPGAs” (by Xue LIU, Qing-xu DENG, Bo-ning HOU and Ze-ke WANG) discusses techniques that can be used. The ARTIQ implementation simply keeps resetting the receiver until the comma is aligned, since relatively long lock times are acceptable.

The series of K selection words is then used to form auxiliary packets and the idle pattern. When there is no auxiliary packet to transfer or to delimitate auxiliary packets, the K selection word 100 is used. To transfer data from an auxiliary packet, the K selection word 0ab is used, with ab containing two bits of data from the packet. An auxiliary packet is delimited by at least one 100 K selection word.

Both real-time traffic and K selection words are scrambled in order to make the generated electromagnetic interference practically independent from the DRTIO traffic. A multiplicative scrambler is used and its state is shared between the real-time traffic and K selection words, so that real-time data can be descrambled immediately after the scrambler has been synchronized from the K characters. Another positive effect of the scrambling is that commas always appear regularly in the absence of any traffic (and in practice also appear regularly on a busy link). This makes a receiver always able to synchronize itself to an idling transmitter, which removes the need for relatively complex link initialization states.

Due to the use of K characters both as delimiters for real-time packets and as information carrier for auxiliary packets, auxiliary traffic is guaranteed a minimum bandwith simply by having a maximum size limit on real-time packets.

Clocking

At the DRTIO satellite device, the recovered and aligned transceiver clock is used for clocking RTIO channels, after appropriate jitter filtering using devices such as the Si5324. The same clock is also used for clocking the DRTIO transmitter (loop timing), which simplifies clock domain transfers and allows for precise round-trip-time measurements to be done.

RTIO clock synchronization

As part of the DRTIO link initialization, a real-time packet is sent by the core device to each satellite device to make them load their respective timestamp counters with the timestamp values from their respective packets.

RTIO outputs

Controlling a remote RTIO output involves placing the RTIO event into the FIFO of the remote device. The core device maintains a cache of the space available in each channel FIFO of the remote device. If, according to the cache, there is space available, then a packet containing the event information (timestamp, address, channel, data) is sent immediately and the cached value is decremented by one. If, according to the cache, no space is available, then the core device sends a request for the space available in the remote FIFO and updates the cache. The process repeats until at least one FIFO entry is available for the event, at which point a packet containing the event information is sent as before.

Detecting underflow conditions is the responsibility of the core device; should an underflow occur then no DRTIO packet is transmitted. Sequence errors are handled similarly.

RTIO inputs

The core device sends a request to the satellite for reading data from one of its channels. The request contains a timeout, which is the RTIO timestamp to wait for until an input event appears. The satellite then replies with either an input event (containing timestamp and data), a timeout, or an overflow error.