Correlating Wire Addresses with Regions-of-Interest in Cylindrical Multi-Wire Detectors

Event triggers in colliding beam experiments are often based on the detection of apparent tracks in relatively broad pre-assigned "roads". The validity of the trigger is then verified by a filter program which accepts only those events which satisfy somewhat more stringent geometrical conditions. In high background experiments, a good deal of time is wasted while the filter program searches the list of wire addresses to find those that fall within the particular roads that produced the trigger, thus limiting the ability of the filter to keep up with high event rates. A hardware processor will be described that performs this correlation function in real time on the data stream flowing to the computer. A particular feature of this processor is its ability to work with cylindrical detectors where the roads may straddle the first chamber wire and thus may include both high-numbered and low-numbered addresses.