gFEX, the ATLAS Calorimeter Level 1 Real Time Processor

The global feature extractor (gFEX) is a component of the Level-1Calorimeter trigger Phase-I upgrade for the ATLAS experiment. It is intended to identify patterns of energy associated with the hadronic decays of high momentum Higgs, W, & Z bosons, top quarks, and exotic particles in real time at the LHC crossing rate. The single processor board will be packaged in an Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA) module and implemented as a fast reconfigurable processor based on three Xilinx Ultra-scale FPGAs. The board will receive coarse-granularity information from all the ATLAS calorimeters on 264 optical fibers with the data transferred at the 40 MHz LHC clock frequency. The gFEX will be controlled by a single system-on-chip processor, ZYNQ, that will be used to configure all the processor FPGAs, monitor board health, and interface to external signals. Now, the pre-prototype board which includes one ZYNQ and one Vertex-7 FPGA has been designed for testing and verification. The performance of Pre-prototype will be presented. We will also present the design of the gFEX board with Ultra-scale and discuss how it is being implemented. Although the board is being designed specifically for the ATLAS experiment, it is sufficiently generic that it could be used for fast data processing at other HEP or NP experiments.