The TOTEM front end driver, its components and applications in the TOTEM experiment

The TOTEM Front End Driver, so-called TOTFED, receives and handles trigger building and tracking data from the TOTEM detectors, and interfaces to the global trigger and data acquisition systems. The TOTFED is based on the VME64x standard and has deliberately been kept modular. It is very flexible and programmable to deal with the different TOTEM sub-detectors and possible evolution of the data treatment and trigger algorithms over the duration of the experiment. The main objectives for each unit are to acquire ondetector data from up to 36 optical links, to perform fast data treatment (reduction, consistency checking, etc.), to transfer it to the next level of the system (via the Slink64 interface), and to store data on request for slow spy readout via VME64x or USB2.0. The TOTFED is fully compatible with CMS and permits TOTEM to run both standalone and together with CMS. The TOTEM Front End Driver, its components and applications in the TOTEM experiment are presented in this paper.