Prototype design of a timing and fast control system in the CBM experiment

The Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment is designed to handle interaction rates of up to 10 MHz and up to 1 TB/s of raw data generated. With triggerless streaming data acquisition in the experiment and beam intensity fluctuations, it is expected that occasional data bursts will surpass bandwidth capabilities of the Data Acquisition System (DAQ) system. In order to preserve integrity of event data, the bandwidth of DAQ must be throttled in an organised way with minimum information loss. The Timing and Fast Control (TFC) system provides a latency-optimised datapath for throttling commands and distributes a system clock together with a global timestamp. This paper describes a prototype design of the system with focus on synchronisation and its evaluation.