A hardware implementation of Region-of-Interest selection in LAr-TPC for data reduction and triggering

Large Liquid Argon TPC detectors in the range of multi-kton mass for neutrino and astroparticle physics require the extraction and treatment of signals from some 105 wires. In order to increase the throughput of the DAQ system an on-line lossless data compression has been realized reducing by almost a factor 4 the data flow. Moreover a new efficient on-line identification algorithm of wire hits was studied, implemented on the ICARUS digital read-out boards and fully tested on the ICARINO LAr-TPC facility operated at LNL INFN Laboratory with cosmic-rays. This system permits the extraction of the event Region-of-Interest maximizing the global throughput of the DAQ and the realization of a trigger based on charge deposition on the wires. Capability to trigger isolated low energy events down to few MeV visible energy was also demonstrated.