ADC-Based Real-Time Signal Processing for the PANDA Straw Tube Tracker

The PANDA (AntiProton Annihilations at Darmstadt) experiment is being built at the new Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Darmstadt, Germany. PANDA will measure antiproton-proton annihilation reactions in the charm quark mass range to investigate the nature of the strong interaction. This particle physics experiment will run at very high reaction rates of 10-20 MHz. Our work is related to an ADC (analog-to-digital converter) based data acquisition system for the PANDA Straw Tube Tracker (STT). The STT will be able to deliver data rates up to 20 GByte/s through over 4600 signal channels and could require major efforts for the hardware implementation as well as high offline processing power. Test beam studies were carried out in order to specify a proper system architecture with feasible hardware and to reduce output data stream to a level suitable for offline processing. We analyze the straw tube response to both the proton beam and ⁵⁵Fe irradiation. Furthermore, we present real-time processing using the neighboring straw information and introduce the technique to reconstruct the tracks.