FPGA-Based Real-Time Charged Particle Trajectory Reconstruction at the Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

The upgrades of the Compact Muon Solenoid particle physics experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider provide a major challenge for the real-time collision data selection. This paper presents a novel approach to pattern recognition and charged particle trajectory reconstruction using an all-FPGA solution. The challenges include a large input data rate of about 20 to 40~Tbps, processing a new batch of input data every 25~ns, each consisting of about 10,000 precise position measurements of particles ('stubs'), perform the pattern recognition on these stubs to find the trajectories, and produce the list of parameters describing these trajectories within 4~us. A proposed solution to this problem is described, in particular, the implementation of the pattern recognition and particle trajectory determination using an all-FPGA system. The results of an end-to-end demonstrator system based on Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGAs that meets timing and performance requirements are presented.