AMsystem: the associative memories readout system

The AMsystem has been designed having in mind mainly the track finding problem in the Collider Detector Facility (CDF) silicon vertex detector, and the trigger studies at fixed target and colliders (NAxx project at CERN). The AMsystem is conceived as a data driven device, where the input data are parallel streams of detector hit coordinates, and the output data are a list of recognized tracks. This allows the structure to be easily embedded in an existing trigger/data-acquisition system. The core of the system consists of a set of boards housing the AMchips and the GLUEchips (needed for tree-structuring the readout chain), and of a Sequencer board which controls the input/output (I/O) operations performed on each event. The I/O interfaces connect to the data acquisition system and to the experiment-specific data sources. All the boards are housed in a double Eurocard crate. VMEbus is used to control and download the AMsystem.<
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