Pre-production validation of the ATLAS Level-1 calorimeter trigger system

The Level-1 calorimeter trigger is a major part of the first stage of event selection for the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. It is a digital, pipelined system with several stages of processing, largely based on FPGAs, which perform programmable algorithms in parallel with a fixed latency to process about 300 Gbyte/s of input data. The real-time output consists of counts of different types of trigger objects and energy sums. Prototypes of all module types have been undergoing intensive testing before final production during 2005. Verification of their correct operation has been performed stand-alone and in the ATLAS test-beam at CERN. Results from these investigations will be presented, along with a description of the methodology used to perform the tests.