The FTK to Level-2 Interface Card (FLIC)

The FTK to Level-2 Interface Card (FLIC) of the ATLAS Fast TracKer (FTK) trigger upgrade is the final component in the FTK chain of custom electronics. The FTK performs full event tracking using the ATLAS Silicon detectors for every Level-1 accepted event at 100 kHz. The FLIC is a custom Advanced Telecommunications Architecture (ATCA) card that interfaces the upstream FTK system with the ATLAS trigger and data acquisition (TDAQ) system, and allows for event processing on commercial PC blades making use of the 10 GB Ethernet full mesh ATCA back-plane. The FLIC receives data on 8 optical links at a bandwidth of ~1 Gbps per channel, reformats the data to the ATLAS standard record format, and performs the conversion from local to global module identifier using look up tables in SRAM. After processing, the event records are sent out to the TDAQ system using the S-LINK protocol at 2 Gbps, with a latency of O(10 microseconds). The data processing is handled in two Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGAs, with two additional Virtex-6 FPGAs communicating with the processor blades over the ATCA back plane. The four FPGAs are connected via a full internal mesh of high speed GTX lines. This paper reports the design goals, implementation, and testing results of the FLIC.