A zero-suppression algorithm for the readout electronics of the SciFi Tracker for the LHCb detector upgrade

A new detector made of scintillating fibres read out by arrays of silicon photomultipliers (SiPM) is planned for the LHCb detector upgrade, foreseen in 2018/19. The development of dedicated readout electronics in the harsh LHC environment leads to challenges. Each SiPM array generates 10.24 Gb/s of data after the digitization leading to a data rate of 47.2 Tb/s for the full detector. Such a large amount of data can not be reasonably processed by a computing farm. In this paper, we describe the readout scheme and the zero suppression algorithm used to reduce the data flow below 8 Tb/s.