The ATLAS level-1 central trigger system
The central part of the ATLAS Level-1 trigger system consists of the central trigger processor (CTP), the local trigger processors (LTPs), the timing, trigger, and control (TTC) system, and the read-out driver busy (ROD/spl I.bar/BUSY) modules. The CTP combines information from calorimeter and muon trigger processors, as well as from other sources, and makes the final Level-1 accept decision (L1A) on the basis of lists of selection criteria, implemented as trigger menus. Timing and trigger signals are fanned out to about 40 LTPs, which inject them into the subdetector TTC partitions. The LTPs also support stand-alone running and can generate all necessary signals from memory. The TTC partitions fan out the timing and trigger signals to the subdetector front-end electronics. The ROD/spl I.bar/BUSY modules receive busy signals from the front-end electronics, and send them to the CTP (via an LTP) to throttle the generation of L1As. An overview of the ATLAS Level-1 central trigger system will be presented, with emphasis on the design and tests of the CTP modules.
Commissioning Experience with the ATLAS Level-1 Calorimeter Trigger System
The ATLAS Level-1 Calorimeter Trigger is one of the main elements of the first stage of event selection for the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. The input stage consists of a mixed analogue/digital component taking trigger sums from the ATLAS calorimeters. The trigger logic is performed in a digital, pipelined system with several stages of processing, largely based on FPGAs, which perform programmable algorithms in parallel with a fixed latency to process about 300 Gbyte/s of input data. The real-time output consists of counts of different types of physics objects and energy sums. The production of final modules started in 2006, and installation of these modules and the necessary infrastructure at ATLAS has been underway for some time, with the intention of having a full system in situ during 2007, before first collisions at the LHC. The first experiences of commissioning and running the full scale system will be presented, along with results from integration tests performed with the upstream calorimeters, and the downstream trigger and data flow systems.
The CMS tracker front-end and control electronics in an LHC like beam test
A complete prototype of the CMS tracker read-out and control system has been built using components as close as possible to the final design. It is based on an amplifier and analogue pipeline memory chip (APV), analogue optical links transmitting at 40Ms/s and a VME mounted digitisation and data handling board (FED-PMC), supplemented by a control architecture based on FECs which set and monitor the components of the entire system. This system has been successfully operated for the first time under LHC like beam conditions in a 25ns structured beam provided by the SPS at CERN. The objective was primarily to test the synchronisation and pile-up effects in a high trigger rate environment and to examine the many issues involved in operating a complete readout and control system.