A high-throughput data acquisition architecture based on serial interconnects

The authors describe a data acquisition architecture based on a simple, high-bandwidth event builder and serial data transmission. Extensive parallelism allows collection and building of event data at combined rates of several gigabytes per second. No high-speed data flows through bus backplanes, and the standard connection for both front-end modules is a fast unidirectional serial link. By limiting the data reduction factors expected from any single trigger processor to that which can be achieved using simple hardware, no support for complex message-passing protocols is necessary. Dividing the processing load into a large number of independent paths, each of which contains the information from an entire event, allows the use of commercial processors