The Associative Memory Boards for the FTK Processor at ATLAS

The Associative Memory (AM) system, the main part of the FastTracker (FTK) processor, is designed to perform pattern matching using the information of the silicon tracking detectors. It finds track candidates at low resolution that are seeds for the following step performing precise track fitting. The system has to support challenging data traffic, handled by a group of modern low cost FPGAs, the Xilinx Spartan6 chips, which have Low-Power Gigabit Transceivers (GTP). Each GTP transceiver is a combined transmitter and receiver capable of operating at data rates up to 3.2 Gb/s. \nThe paper reports about the tests, performance and cooling results of the integrated system. The tests are executed at full speed rate (100 MHz for parallel processing of 16 bits words, transferred at 2 Gb/s on the serial links) injecting events by VME in input FIFOs and reading the results by VME from output FIFOs. An estimation of the power consumption of the final system is also provided.