Design of a trigger and data acquisition system for a detector at PEP-II

This paper proposes a design of a trigger and data acquisition system for a detector at the PEP-II B Factory. The system is asynchronous, data-driven, and scalable. Design goals include orthogonal tracking and calorimetric triggers, minimal dead time, graceful degradation, high efficiency, and useful performance in the face of backgrounds so high as to overwhelm reconstruction. Also described are instrumentation of the Drift Chamber, based on 8-bit FADCs, and of the Calorimeter, based on a new custom integrated circuit, the Charge Amplifier with Range Encoding (CARE), and 10-bit ADCs. This design employs commercial embedded CPUs in VME and VXI crates.<
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