Designing an RD53B Trigger Pattern Encoder for the YARR Readout System

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is currently undergoing the High-Luminosity (HL-LHC) upgrade to increase the number of collisions per unit of time in the collider. This update will require a new set of readout chips to be developed for the ATLAS detector used in the LHC. As a result of this, the RD53B readout chip architecture was created. These chips are designed to collect the data produced by the collisions that occur in the Hl-LHC. The data collection is initiated when the RD53B chips receive a trigger command word that specifies the specific set of data that should be sampled. These commands are produced by a readout system that converts a series of trigger pulses into the proper command encodings. One of these systems is the Yet Another Rapid Readout (YARR) data acquisition system. This system is composed of both a software and a hardware component. The YARR hardware is responsible for sending the properly encoded trigger commands to the readout chip and sending the collision data produced by the chip to the YARR software. This requires the YARR firmware to be loaded into an FPGA board that is connected to a host computer running the YARR software. The YARR firmware is currently being updated to support the command protocol used by the RD53B chip architecture. The project described in this thesis mainly focuses on designing the logic needed to produce the trigger commands used by the RD53B chips. This functionality is accomplished by adding a trigger code generator and a trigger extender module to the YARR firmware. The trigger code generator is mainly responsible for gathering 4-bit trigger patterns and converting them into the proper 16-bit trigger command words. The trigger extender is mainly responsible for extending the duration of a trigger pulse. To test these modules, a testbench that simulates a series of trigger pulses was designed. After that, the modified YARR firmware was tested on a real RD53B chip by running a YARR software scan.