skip to main content
OSTI.GOV title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: The implementation of Global Feature EXtractor (gFEX) - the ATLAS Calorimeter Level 1 Trigger system for LHC Run-3 upgrade

Journal Article · · Journal of Instrumentation

As part of the ATLAS Phase-I Upgrade, the global Feature EXtractor (gFEX) is one of several hardware modules designed to help maintain the ATLAS Level-1 trigger acceptance rate with the increasing Large Hadron Collider (LHC) luminosity and the increasing Pile-Up conditions. The gFEX is used to identify patterns of energy associated with the hadronic decays of high momentum Higgs, W & Z bosons, top quarks, and exotic particles in real time at the 40 MHz LHC bunch crossing rate. The board is required to receive coarse-granularity (Δη×Δphiv = 0.2×0.2 gTower) information from the entire ATLAS calorimeters on 276 optical fibers. A prototype v1 with one Xilinx ZYNQ FPGA, and one Vertex-7 FPGA for technology validation has been designed and tested in 2015. With the lessons learned from the prototype v1, a prototype v2 with three Vertex UltraScale FPGAs and one ZYNQ FPGA has been implemented to verify full functionalities of gFEX in 2016. Based on the prototype v2 design, a prototype v3, the final gFEX prototype, is implemented, which is an ATCA module consisting of three Vertex UltraScale+ FPGAs, one ZYNQ UltraScale+ SoC, and 35 MiniPODs. This board receives up to 300 fiber optical links from calorimeters and transmits trigger data on 96 links to the to the ATLAS Level-1 Topological trigger (L1Topo [1]) at the speed up to 12.8 Gb/s. There are also 24 electrical links on board for communication between two FPGAs with the speed up to 25.6 Gb/s. The performance of three prototype boards have been tested and evaluated. For the prototype v3 board, the high-speed optical links are stable at 12.8 Gb/s with Bit Error Ratio (BER) < 1 × 10-15. The low-latency parallel GPIO (General Purpose I/O) buses between FPGAs are stable at 1.12 Gb/s. The peripheral components of ZYNQ UltraScale+ SoC, such as 16 GB DDR4 DIMM, UART, SPI flashes, and Ethernet, have also been verified. Here, the test results of the prototype v3 board validate the gFEX technologies, architecture and full functionalities. Now the final production board is being produced.

Research Organization:
Brookhaven National Lab. (BNL), Upton, NY (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP)
Grant/Contract Number:
SC0012704
OSTI ID:
1471179
Report Number(s):
BNL-209045-2018-JAAM
Journal Information:
Journal of Instrumentation, Vol. 13, Issue 07; ISSN 1748-0221
Publisher:
Institute of Physics (IOP)Copyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 1 work
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

Similar Records

Development and data path integration test of the global Feature EXtractor for the ATLAS Level-1 calorimeter trigger system Phase-I upgrade
Journal Article · Thu May 30 00:00:00 EDT 2019 · Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research. Section A, Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment · OSTI ID:1471179

Prototype Design of Global Common Module for ATLAS Experiment’s Phase-II Upgrade
Journal Article · Tue Aug 01 00:00:00 EDT 2023 · IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science · OSTI ID:1471179

System design and prototyping for the CMS Level-1 Trigger at the High-Luminosity LHC
Journal Article · Tue Jan 17 00:00:00 EST 2023 · Journal of Instrumentation · OSTI ID:1471179