KOR

e-Article

The charged trigger system of NA48 at CERN
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci. Nuclear Science, IEEE Transactions on. 45(4):1776-1781 Aug, 1998
Subject
Nuclear Engineering
Bioengineering
Hardware
Spectroscopy
Particle tracking
Switches
Mesons
Kinetic theory
Wire
Real time systems
Kinematics
Delay
Language
ISSN
0018-9499
1558-1578
Abstract
The NA48 charged trigger is a mixed hardware and software real time processing system intended to detect the interesting configurations of K/sup 0/ charged decays. It achieves real-time event building, track reconstruction and kinematics computation on drift chamber data at an event rate of 100 kHz and within a maximum decision latency of 100 /spl mu/s. The system uses data driven, FPGA-based coordinate builders, a hardware event builder based on a crossbar switch, and a farm of up to 16 event processors for its software part. It has been installed and operated at CERN since 1995. After a description of the constraints and architecture of the various subsystems, the paper will give an account of the results and performance of the system based on the 1996/1997 runs. More specifically, the replacement of the present DSP-based implementation of the processing farm by RISC processors will be discussed.