FTK: A Hardware Real-Time Track Finder for the ATLAS Trigger System

An overview of the ATLAS Fast Tracker processor will be presented, reporting the design of the system, its expected performance, and the current integration status. The Fast TracKer is an upgrade of the trigger system at the ATLAS experiment. This system is designed to lower the event rate from the proton-proton collisions occurring at 40 MHz to about 1 kHz for the expected LHC luminosity (2x1034cm-2s-1). To achieve this selection rate an intensive use of particle tracking must be exploited. For such a demanding application a dedicated hardware tracker was designed, the Fast TracKer processor. To achieve the required performance Fast TracKer uses a combination of custom designed VLSI chips and latest generation FPGAs, all embedded in custom designed boards, exploiting a fully parallel architecture. Fast TracKer provides track reconstruction based on the full silicon (inner) detector with resolution comparable to the offline reconstruction with a latency of approximately 100μs.