White Rabbit is a technology developed at CERN. Its primary goal is to provide the LHC accelerator chain with deterministic data transfer, sub-nanosecond accuracy and a synchronization precision of a few picoseconds.
First used in 2012, the technology has since then expanded its applications outside the field of particle physics.
It has shown its innovative potential by being commercialized and introduced into different industries.
Telecommunications, financial markets, smart grids, the space industry and quantum computing gain the maximum benefits.
CERN developed WR as open-source hardware. At first, it was adopted by other research infrastructures with similar challenges in highly accurate synchronization of distributed electronic devices.
CERN developed WR as open-source hardware.
By means of the proactive engagement of CERN's Knowledge Transfer and Beam Controls groups, a larger group of companies and organizations contributed to the development of hardware, software, and gateware for WR switches and nodes. The WR ecosystem quickly grew to include several organizations, developing open hardware for widespread benefit. This collaboration brought improvements to the original concept, allowing CERN to also benefit from the new developments.
On June 16, 2020, the WR technology was recognized by being included in the worldwide industry standard called Prescision Time Protocol (PTP), under the IEEE, the world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to hi-tech for the benefit of people. The WR addition to the PTP standard, referred to as High Accuracy, increases PTP's synchronization performance by a few orders of magnitude, from sub-microsecond to sub-nanosecond.
"PTP is the first IEEE standard to incorporate a CERN-born technology. This is a major step for White Rabbit. It is already widely used in large scientific facilities and its adoption in the industry is gaining momentum. Its incorporation into the PTP standard will allow hardware vendors world-wide to produce WR equipment compliant with the PTP standard and consequently accelerate its dissemination on a larger scale," says Maciej Lipinski, an electronics engineer at CERN in charge of standardization procedure.
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