München 2006 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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HK: Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 27: Instrumentation und Anwendungen

HK 27.6: Vortrag

Dienstag, 21. März 2006, 18:15–18:30, H

First test results of the ALICE TRD Track Matching Unit — •Jan de Cuveland — Kirchhoff-Institut für Physik, Universität Heidelberg

The Transition Radiation Detector (TRD) is one of the main detectors of the ALICE experiment at the LHC. One of its primary objectives is to trigger on high momentum electrons.

The trigger complexity is considerable and requires fast event reconstruction. Based on data from 1.2 million analog channels, the reconstruction must be performed within 6 µs to contribute to the Level-1 trigger decision. After preprocessing the analog data and applying pattern-matching algorithms, the resulting track segments of different chambers must be reassembled three-dimensionally. From the curvature of the reconstructed tracks, the momentum of the originating particle is calculated to finally make the trigger decision. This part of the online processing must be completed in less than 2 µs.

A hardware architecture has been developed which is able to perform the processing of up to 20 000 track segments in the required time by means of massive parallelism. The track-matching unit presented here is one of its main building blocks. It is an FPGA-based system utilizing PCI and 12 fibre-optical SFP transceiver interfaces, realized as a CompactPCI plug-in card. The main FPGA is a Xilinx Virtex-4 FX chip which includes integrated multi-gigabit serializer/deserializer and PowerPC processor blocks. This presentation focuses on results from first tests with a prototype version of the track-matching unit.

This work is supported by the BMBF (06HD9551).