BTeV Trigger/DAQ Innovations

BTeV was a proposed high-energy physics (HEP) collider experiment designed for the study of B-physics and CP Violation at the Tevatron at Fermilab. BTeV included a large-scale, high-speed trigger and data acquisition (DAQ) system, reading data from the detector at 500 Gbyte/s and writing data to mass storage at a rate of 200 Mbyte/s. The design of the trigger/DAQ system was innovative while remaining realistic in terms of technical feasibility, schedule and cost. This paper will give an overview of the BTeV trigger/DAQ architecture, highlight some of the technical challenges, and describe the approach that was used to solve these challenges