FPGA-based Cherenkov ring recognition in nuclear and particle physics experiments

Cherenkov ring is often adopted to identify particles flying through the detector systems in nuclear and particle physics experiments. In this paper, we introduce an improved ring recognition algorithm and present its FPGA implementation. Compared to the previous implementation based on VMEBus and FPGAs, our design is evaluated to outperform by several tens up to hundred times with acceptable resource utilizations on a Xilinx Virtex-4 FX60 FPGA. The design module will reside in the online data acquisition (DAQ) and trigger facilities, and contribute to significantly reduce the data rate of storage for offline analysis by retaining only interesting events and dropping the noise. Our customized FPGA cluster in one ATCA [1] shelf is foreseen to achieve an equivalent computation capability up to thousands of commodity PCs for particle recognition.