The Belle L1.5 trigger

During the summer shutdown of 2003 the new silicon vertex detector SVD2 was installed in Belle at the KEK-B factory in Tsukuba, Japan and started to take data in October 2003. It provides important improvements in the tracking capabilities and adds new trigger functionality. In addition a new hardware trigger level 1.5 was designed and installed that takes advantage of the digitized SVD hit data. The improvement in the Belle trigger system is important to deal with the increasing luminosity and higher beam currents of the KEK-B collider. The design of the level 1.5 trigger system is reviewed and results from the data taking are presented.