Speaker
Description
The new LHCb Vertex Locator for LHCb, comprising a new pixel detector
and readout electronics will be installed in 2020 for data-taking in
Run 3 at the LHC. The electronics centres around the "VeloPix" ASIC at
the front-end operating in a triggerless readout at 40 MHz. A custom
serialiser, called GWT (Gigabit Wireline Transmitter) and associated
custom protocol have been designed for the VeloPix. The GWT data are
sent from the serialisers of the VeloPix at a line rate of 5.12 Gb/s,
reaching a total data rate of 2-3 Tb/s for the full VELO detector.
Data are sent over 300 m optic-fibre links to the control and readout
electronics cards for deserialisation and processing in Intel Arria
10 FPGAs. Due to the VeloPix triggerless design, latency variances up
to 12 $\mu s$ can occur between adjacent datagrams. It is therefore
essential to buffer and synchronise the data in firmware prior to
onward propagation or suffer a huge CPU processing penalty. This paper
will describe the architecture of the readout firmware in detail
with focus given to the re-synchronisation mechanism and techniques
for clusterisation. Issues found during readout commissioning, and
scaling resource utilisation, along with the their solutions, will be
illustrated. The latest results of the firmware data processing chain be
presented as well as the verification procedures employed in simulation.
Challenges for the next generation of the detector will also be presented
with ideas for a readout processing solution.
| Minioral | Yes |
|---|---|
| IEEE Member | No |
| Are you a student? | No |
