Track recognition in 4 (micro)s by a systolic trigger processor using a parallel Hough transform

A parallel Hough transform processor has been developed that identifies circular particle tracks in a 2D projection of the OPAL jet chamber. The high-speed requirements imposed by the 8 bunch crossing mode of LEP could be fulfilled by computing the starting angle and the radius of curvature for each well defined track in less than 4 ||micro~second~. The system consists of a Hough transform processor that determines well defined tracks, and a Euler processor that counts their number by applying the Euler relation to the thresholded result of the Hough transform. A prototype of a systolic processor has been built that handles one sector of the jet chamber. It consists of 35x32 processing elements that were loaded into 21 programmable gate arrays (XILINX). This processor runs at a clock rate of 40 MHz. It has been tested offline with about 1000 original OPAL events. No deviations from the off-line simulation have been found. A trigger efficiency of 93% has been obtained. The prototype together with the associated drift time measurement unit has been installed at the OPAL detector at LEP and 100k events have been sampled to evaluate the system under detector conditions.