The Firmware of the Front-End Driver for the Data Acquisition System of the TOTEM Experiment

The TOTEM experiment at the LHC at CERN will measure the total proton-proton cross section with precision of 1 %, elastic proton scattering and diffractive dissociation at the center of the mass energy of 14 TeV. This article is brief report on the TOTFed motherboard, which is the main part of the on-line Data Acquisition of the TOTEM. The designed firmware is supposed to collect data from the particle detectors, build a consistent event frame and send it to the counting room. The data processing is divided between 7 FPGAs. To accomplish the objective, specialized interfaces such as VME64x, S-Link 64, Gigabit Optical Link (GOL) are used. Since a significant part of the applied electronics is specific only for the LHC machine, the FPGA firmware implementation required a deep understanding of the Data Acquisition System and then intensive studies and debugging of the developed solutions.