S. Kirsch

An FPGA-based High-Speed, Low-Latency Processing System for High-Energy Physics

The Global Tracking Unit of the ALICE Transition Radiation Detector is a high-speed, low-latency trigger processor installed at the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. Based on the analysis of up to 20,000 parametrized particle track segments per event, a trigger decision is formed within approx. 2 μs. Furthermore, the system is designed to significantly improve the overall detector performance by providing a complex and robust multi-event buffering scheme. Data from the detector arrives at an aggregate net bandwidth of 2.16Tbit/s via 1080 optical links and is processed massively in parallel by 109 FPGA-based units organized in a 3-stage hierarchical structure. The embedded PowerPC cores are employed not only to build a monitoring and control system that can be interfaced by the experiment control. They are also used to realize a real-time hardware/software co-design, able to characterize the trigger performance, supervise the operation and intervene in cases of system errors.

First performance results of the ALICE TPC Readout Control Unit 2

This paper presents the first performance results of the ALICE TPC Readout Control Unit 2 (RCU2). With the upgraded hardware typology and the new readout scheme in FPGA design, the RCU2 is designed to achieve twice the readout speed of the present Readout Control Unit. Design choices such as using the flash-based Microsemi Smartfusion2 FPGA and applying mitigation techniques in interfaces and FPGA design ensure a high degree of radiation tolerance. This paper presents the system level irradiation test results as well as the first commissioning results of the RCU2. Furthermore, it will be concluded with a discussion of the planned updates in firmware.