System-on-an-FPGA Design for Real-Time Particle Track Recognition and Reconstruction in Physics Experiments

In particle physics experiments, the momenta of charged particles are studied by observing their deflection in a magnetic field. Dedicated detectors measure the particle tracks and complex algorithms are required for track recognition and reconstruction. This CPU-intensive task is usually implemented as off-line software running on PC clusters. In this paper, the authors present a system-on-chip design for the track recognition and reconstruction based on modern FPGA technologies. The basic principle of the algorithm is ported from software into the FPGA fabric.