The Evolution of the Region of Interest Builder in the ATLAS Experiment

ATLAS is a general purpose particle detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN designed to measure the products of proton collisions. Given their high interaction rate (1GHz), selective triggering in real time is required to reduce the rate to the experiment’s data storage capacity (1KHz). To meet this requirement, ATLAS employs a combination of hardware and software triggers to select interesting collisions for physics analysis. The Region of Interest Builder (RoIB) is an integral part of the ATLAS detector Trigger and Data Acquisition (TDAQ) chain where the coordinates of the regions of interest (RoIs) identified by the first level trigger (L1) are collected and passed to the High Level Trigger (HLT) to make a decision. While the current custom RoIB operated reliably during the first run of the LHC, it is desirable to have the RoIB more operationally maintainable in the new run, which will reach higher luminosities with an increased complexity of L1 triggers. We are responsible for migrating the functionality of the multi-card VME based RoIB into a single PCI-Express card in a commodity PC. In our testbed, we are reading out 12 channels with fragment size of 128 32 bit words at 150 KHz.