Presentation at the 14th White Rabbit Workshop 2025 at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, Jun 25-26, 2025

White Rabbit is a technology that allows to synchronize networked devices or endpoints tens of kilometers apart with a sub-nanosecond accuracy. It is now fully integrated into the IEEE1588-2019 or PTP v2.1 standard as high accuracy (HA) profile. Each endpoint employs frequency and phase measurement and adjustment techniques using field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and external voltage-controlled crystal oscillators (VCXOs). However, this usually requires external circuit boards with specific components, which is not available on commercially off-the-shelf (COTS) development boards.
This talk provides an overview about the most major steps on White Rabbit within MLE. We present our journey with the Dormouse FMC, featuring tunable oscillators that are required to deploy and operate White Rabbit, and the enablement of it for AMD ZCU102, ZCU106, ZCU111 platforms. Based on this development a bistatic RADAR setup has been built together with and at KIT. The respective setup is also used in 6G massive MIMO experiments.
As a side effect of the Dormouse related developments some basic FMC Card support, SiT3521 operation, extensions to the HMC7044 CLI command, GTY transceiver support, etc. have been added, which currently wait for MRs to be opened.
In parallel a ZC706 and X310 based White Rabbit implementation has been put together using the PICXO approach, which is used in one of the research projects. The same project received refined GNSS support, which is publicly available as an MR already.
To enhance the accuracy of the AMD devkit based MLE WR nodes an initial absolute calibration session has been carried out together and at KIT.
We also provide a peek into our test infrastructure and an outlook into what we plan to achieve throughout the rest of this year.
To learn more about the details, download the slides below or contact us for more information.