The Input Mezzanine Card for the ATLAS Fast TracKer (FTK) System

The Input Mezzanine Card for the ATLAS Fast TracKer (FTK) System In this paper the Input Mezzanine card of the ATLAS Fast TracKer (FTK) system is presented. FTK is an approved ATLAS upgrade that has the goal to provide a complete list of tracks to the ATLAS HLT (High Level Triggers) for each level-1 accepted event, up to 100 kHz event rate, with a very small latency, of the order of 100 μsec. The FTK will receive data from the pixel and microstrip detectors to reconstruct data from the whole silicon tracking detector to provide high-quality reconstructed track parameters for all tracks with transverse momentum above 1 GeV/c to the HLT. The FTK Input Mezzanine card is the input stage of the FTK system. Its role is to perform real time clustering of microstrip and pixel data, thus reducing the amount of data propagated to the subsequent processing levels with minimal information loss. To achieve this, 1D-clustering is executed on the microstrip data. A more advanced and demanding 2D-clustering algorithm is implemented on the pixel data, which uses a moving-window technique. We report on the design of the card, the firmware used, the testing results of the integrated hardware as well as comparisons with the simulation.