An application using micro TCA for real-time event assembly

The Electronic Systems Engineering Department of the Computing Sector at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has undertaken the effort of designing an AMC that meets the specifications within the MicroTCA framework. The application chosen to demonstrate the hardware is the real-time event assembly of data taken by a particle tracking pixel telescope. In the past, the telescope would push all of its data to a PC where the data was stored to disk. Then event assembly, geometry inference, and particle tracking were all done at a later time. This approach made it difficult to efficiently assess the quality of the data as it was being taken - at times, resulting in wasted test beam time. Now, we can insert in the data path, between the telescope and the PC, a commercial MicroTCA crate housing our AMC. The AMC receives, buffers, and processes the data from the tracking telescope and transmits complete, assembled events to the PC in real-time. In this paper, we report on the design approach and the results achieved when the MicroTCA hardware was employed for the first time during a test beam run at the Fermi Test Beam Facility in 2012.