FTK Input Mezzanine and Data Formatter for the Fast Tracker at ATLAS

The Fast Tracker (FTK) is an integral part of trigger upgrade program for the ATLAS detector. LHC Run 2 restarts operations in March 2015 at a center of mass energy of 13 TeV and an average of 40-50 simultaneous proton collisions per beam crossing. The higher luminosity demands a more sophisticated trigger system with increased use of tracking information. However, the combinatorial problem posed by charged particle tracking becomes increasingly difficult due to the large number of multiple interactions per bunch crossing. The Fast Tracker (FTK) is a highly-parallel hardware system that rapidly finds and reconstructs tracks in the ATLAS inner detector for every event that passes the Level-1 trigger at a maximum event rate of 100 kHz. This paper focuses on the FTK Input Mezzanine card (FTK IM) and Data Formatter (DF) boards that are the input interface and the first processing stage of the FTK system. The board design, combined test results, and production status are reported.