Study and Optimization of Particle Track Detection via Hough Transform Hardware Implementation for the ATLAS Phase-II Trigger Upgrade

In the CERN of Geneva the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will undergo several deep upgrades in the next years. Instantaneous and Integrated Luminosity will be increased respectively up to 5−7·10 34 cm −2 s −1 and 3000 f b −1 . Alongside this collider the experiments exploiting LHC will undergo through upgrades crucial to fulfill the HEP goals. The ATLAS upgrades are divided into phases, namely Phase-I and Phase-II. Part of the ATLAS upgrade concerns the Trigger and Data Acquisition systems. In particular, for the ATLAS trigger, a big technological update is planned for the Phase-II. My contribution to these Phase-I and Phase-II plans has been focused to the Trigger and Data Acquisition system electronic update. In the Phase-I upgrade I worked at the commissioning of the new FELIX readout cards FLX-712 which will be mounted on part of the TDAQ system. These cards are FPGA based with a bandwidth up to 480 Gb/s and exploit PCI Express Generation 3 technology. My work has been focused on the preparation and the follow up of part of the tests of the cards for quality checks and controls. The ATLAS Phase-II trigger targets to increase its output data stream to the Tier 0 of one order of magnitude. For the ATLAS Phase-II upgrade I developed an implementation of a tracking algorithm to fulfill the new trigger requirements. This algorithm, known as Hough Transform, is used to track particle trajectories and it has been already demonstrated to be suited for the ATLAS specifications. In this thesis I present the study, the simulations and the hardware implementation of a preliminary version of the Hough Transform algorithm on a XILINX Ultrascale+ FPGA device.