A Readout Driver for the ATLAS LAr Calorimeter at a High Luminosity LHC

A new readout driver (ROD) is being developed as a central part of the signal processing of the ATLAS liquid-argon calorimeters for operation at the sLHC. In the architecture of the upgraded readout system, the ROD modules will have several challenging tasks: receiving of up to 1.4 Tb/s of data per board from the detector front-end on multiple high-speed serial links, low-latency data processing, data buffering, and data transmission to the ATLAS trigger and DAQ systems. In order to evaluate the different components, prototype boards in ATCA format equipped with modern Xilinx and Altera FPGAs have been built. We will report on the measured performance of the SERDES devices, the parallel signal processing using DSP slices, the implementation of trigger interfaces, using e.g. multi-Gb Ethernet, as well as the development of the ATCA infrastructure on the ROD prototype modules.