The charged trigger system of NA48 at CERN

Author

Anvar, S. ; Bugeon, F. ; Debu, P. ; Fallou, J.L. ; Le Provost, H. ; Louis, F. ; Mur, M. ; Schanne, S. ; Tarte, G. ; Vallage, B.

Author_Institution

CEA, Centre d´´Etudes Nucleaires de Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

Volume

45

Issue

4

fYear

1998

fDate

8/1/1998 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

1776

Lastpage

1781

Abstract

The NA48 charged trigger is a mixed hardware and software real time processing system intended to detect the interesting configurations of K⁰ charged decays. It achieves real-time event building, track reconstruction and kinematics computation on drift chamber data at an event rate of 100 kHz and within a maximum decision latency of 100 μs. The system uses data driven, FPGA-based coordinate builders, a hardware event builder based on a crossbar switch, and a farm of up to 16 event processors for its software part. It has been installed and operated at CERN since 1995. After a description of the constraints and architecture of the various subsystems, the paper will give an account of the results and performance of the system based on the 1996/1997 runs. More specifically, the replacement of the present DSP-based implementation of the processing farm by RISC processors will be discussed

Keywords

drift chambers; high energy physics instrumentation computing; nuclear electronics; performance evaluation; real-time systems; reduced instruction set computing; trigger circuits; 100 kHz; CERN NA48 experiment; FPGA-based coordinate builders; RISC processors; charged trigger system; crossbar switch; drift chamber; hardware event builder; kaon⁰ charged decays; kinematics computation; maximum decision latency; mixed hardware/software real time processing system; real-time event building; system performance; track reconstruction; Delay; Hardware; Kinematics; Kinetic theory; Mesons; Particle tracking; Real time systems; Spectroscopy; Switches; Wire;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Nuclear Science, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9499

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/23.710935

Filename

710935