Point and track-finding processors for multiwire chambers

The hardware processors described below are designed to be used in conjunction with multi-wire chambers. They have the characteristic of being based on computational methods in contrast to analogue procedures. In a sense, they are hardware implementations of computer programs. But, being specially designed for their purpose, they are free of the restrictions imposed by the architecture of the computer on which the equivalent program is to run. The parallelism inherent in the algorithms can thus be fully exploited. Combined with the use of fast access scratch-pad memories and the non-sequential nature of the control program, the parallelism accounts for the fact that these processors are expected to execute 2-3 orders of magnitude faster than the equivalent Fortran programs on a CDC 7600 or 6600. As a consequence, methods which are simple and straightforward, but which are impractical because they require an exorbitant amount of computer time can on the contrary be very attractive for hardware implementation. To find particle trajectories, for instance, a systematic search through all possible combinations of co-ordinates will take a prohibitively long time on a computer when the number of tracks and the number of points per track are larger than 3 or 4. But hardware implementation is perfectly feasible and very fast, as will be shown later.