Tracking in the trigger: from the CDF experience to CMS upgrade

Precise tracking information in the online selection of interesting physics events is extremely beneficial at hadron colliders. The CDF experiment at the Tevatron, has shown for the first time the impact of the tracking in triggers, allowing to achieve unprecedented precision in B-physics measurements. The CMS experiment at LHC will largely make use of tracking information at high level trigger, after the Level-1 acceptance. The increased luminosity of the Super-LHC collider will impose to CMS a drastic revision of the Level-1 trigger strategy, incorporating the tracker information at the first stage of the selection. After a review of the CDF and CMS approaches we will discuss several possible Level-1 tracker based concepts for the upgraded CMS detector at Super-LHC. One approach is based on associative memories, which has already been demonstrated in CDF. It makes use of binary readout in the front end electronics, followed by transfer of the full granularity data off detector using optical links to dedicated processors which reconstruct tracks.