Speakers
Description
Physicists use the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN/Geneva to create proton-proton (pp) collisions to study rare particle-physics processes at high energies. Within the Phase-II upgrade, the LHC and the particle detectors will be prepared for high luminosity operation, starting in 2027. One challenge is the high level of signal pile-up caused by up to 200 simultaneous pp collisions. Moreover, in the case of the Liquid-Argon (LAr) Calorimeters of the ATLAS detector, the signals of up to 25 subsequent collisions overlap, which further increases the difficulty to reconstruct the energy deposit in the detector.
In order to cope with this, the readout electronics of the ATLAS LAr Calorimeters will be upgraded, which will allow a real-time processing of the full sequence of digitized pulses sampled at 40 MHz. Conventional signal processing applies an optimal filter to reconstruct the energy of the detector hits. However, the high level of pile-up and a new trigger scheme requires a more advanced signal reconstruction method.
We have developed a dilated convolutional neural network (CNN) which improves the efficiency to identify significant energy deposits above a given noise threshold and which reduces the number of incorrectly identified hits when compared to an optimal filter. Since the implementation target of the CNN is a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), the number of parameters and the mathematical operations are well controlled. A second network structure aims at reconstructing the hit energy, using the information of the hit identification network. The CNN training data are generated by a dedicated simulation program, called AREUS, which provides realistic signal sequences including all noise sources.
Moreover, we implemented the CNN structure in firmware in an automated way, translating the CNN training output file into VHDL, targeting an INTEL Stratix-10 FPGA. Linearized sigmoid activation functions are tested and compared to the full-precision calculation. Very good agreement between FPGA and computer based calculations is observed. We also analyzed the FPGA resource usage and the maximum frequency at which the algorithm can be executed.
The presentation will summarize the latest performance results obtained with the CNN approach and the most recent prototype implementations in FPGA firmware.
