Firmware Development for the ATLAS TileCal sROD

TileCal is the central hadronic calorimeter of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. A main upgrade of the LHC (also called Phase-II) is planned in order to increase the instantaneous luminosity in 2022. At the TileCal level, the upgrade involves the redesign of the complete read-out architecture, affecting both the front-end and the back-end electronics. In the new read-out architecture, the front-end electronics will transmit digitized information of the full detector to the back-end system every single bunch-crossing. Thus, the back-end system must provide digital calibrated information to the first level of trigger. Having all detector data per bunch crossing in the back-end will increase the precision and granularity of the trigger information, improving this way the trigger efficiencies. A reduced part of the detector, 1/256 of the total, will be equipped with the new electronics during 2015 to evaluate the proposed architecture in real conditions in the so-called “demonstrator project”. The upgraded version of the Read-out Driver (sROD) will be the core element of the back-end electronics in Phase-II. This module includes two Xilinx Series 7 Field Programmable Arrays (FPGAs) for data receiving and processing and will be installed and working in an ATCA framework. A complete description of the sROD functionality in terms of firmware will be introduced. In addition, the status of the firmware development and a summary of the main milestones achieved and the future plans will be presented.