The Sensor-to-Actuator Pipeline
From feedthrough to physical gate, L1 is one deterministic pipeline whose stages each carry a bounded latency that composes into a certified whole.
End to end
The control plane is best understood as a single pipeline: sense, validate, estimate, decide, deliver, actuate. Each stage runs in deterministic fabric or on the time-triggered fabric, and each has a proven worst-case latency. The end-to-end bound is the composition of the stages, which is what the 10 µs boundary and the loop budgets are built from.
The stages
- Sense: analog through cryo-rated feedthroughs, ADC on shared clock.
- Validate: range/rate/cross checks, validity mask.
- Estimate: assemble the state vector x, spatial normalization.
- Decide: control law u = -K x (with feedforward), or threshold logic.
- Deliver: setpoint over the deterministic fabric to the driver.
- Actuate: staged value released on a synchronized gate.
Composition of bounds
Because stages do not contend for shared resources, their bounds add: R = R_sense + R_validate + R_estimate + R_decide + R_deliver + R_actuate. Each term is fixed by fabric depth, link schedule, or driver characteristics, so R is a certified constant. This additive structure is why Kronos can grow the pipeline without eroding its guarantees — a new stage adds its bound and nothing else.
Two machines through one pipeline
The same pipeline shape serves both machines; only the estimate and decide stages differ. The breeder decides PF-coil currents from an equilibrium estimate; the burner decides plug power and DEC modulation from a density/potential estimate. Sense, validate, deliver, and actuate are common infrastructure, which is how Kronos shares a hardened control platform across the fleet.