FTK AMchip05: an Associative Memory Chip Prototype for Track Reconstruction at Hadron Collider Experiments
Published in European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics, 2015
The ATLAS FTK track trigger project is an upgrade for the ATLAS trigger system. ATLAS FTK is a dedicated supercomputing processor based on FPGAs and a custom ASIC: the Associative Memory chip (AMchip). The AMchip is a core processor in charge of the real-time pattern recognition stage of the FTK algorithm. It is based on Content Addressable Memory elements connected by advanced computation logic that adds the unique feature to look for correlated data patterns (e.g. tracks made of hits) within a sparse dataset at full I/O speed. We will show the AMchip05 architecture, the design implementation and the in depth performance analysis under different working condition. We will also discuss the impact on physics outreach enabled by the new features added with respect to the previous AMchip generation, in particular the possibility to have variable resolution patterns.
Download slides here.