The Topological Processor for the future ATLAS Level-1 Trigger: From design to commissioning

The ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is designed to measure decay properties of high energetic particles produced in the proton-proton collisions. During its first run, the LHC collided proton bunches at a frequency of 20 MHz, and therefore the detector required a Trigger system to efficiently select events down to a manageable event storage rate of about 400 Hz. By 2015 the LHC instantaneous luminosity will be increased up to 3×10³⁴cm^-2s^-1: this represents an unprecedented challenge faced by the ATLAS Trigger system. To cope with the higher event rate and efficiently select relevant events from a physics point of view, a new element will be included in the Level-1 Trigger scheme after 2015: the Topological Processor (L1Topo). The L1Topo system, currently developed at CERN, will consist initially of an ATCA crate and two L1Topo modules. A high density opto-electroconverter (AVAGO miniPOD) drives up to 1.6 Tb/s of data from the calorimeter and muon detectors into two high-end FPGA (Virtex7-690), to be processed in about 200 ns. The design has been optimized to guarantee excellent signal integrity of the high-speed links and low latency data transmission on the Real Time Data Path (RTDP). The L1Topo receives data in a standalone protocol from the calorimeters and muon detectors to be processed into several VHDL topological algorithms. Those algorithms perform geometrical cuts, correlations and calculate complex observables such as the invariant mass. The output of such topological cuts is sent to the Central Trigger Processor. This talk focuses on the relevant high-density design characteristic of L1Topo, which allows several hundreds optical links to processed (up to 13 Gb/s each) using ordinary PCB material. Relevant test results performed on the L1Topo prototypes to characterize the high-speed links latency (eye diagram, bit error rate, margin analysis) and the logic resource utilization of the algorithms a- e discussed.