A signal distribution board for the timing and fast control master of the CBM experiment

For the CBM experiment a Timing and Fast-Control (TFC) system is being developed. In the detector readout, FPGA-based data processing boards (DPB) are organized in a large number of computing crates. At the crate level, the TFC master is connected to one TFC slave per crate, whereas the DPB AMCs are interconnected by the crates' infrastructure. In this article, an FMC-based signal distribution board is proposed allowing the transmission of a high-quality clock and timing and fast-control data from and to connected TFC slaves at distances of about 30 meters using twisted-pair cables.