A high-resolution TDC-based board for a fully digital trigger and data acquisition system in the NA62 experiment at CERN

Understand

A Time to Digital Converter (TDC) based system, to be used for most sub-detectors in the high-flux rare-decay experiment NA62 at CERN SPS, was built as part of the NA62 fully digital Trigger and Data AcQuisition system (TDAQ), in which the TDC Board (TDCB) and a general-purpose motherboard (TEL62) will play a fundamental role.

• While TDCBs, housing four High Performance Time to Digital Converters (HPTDC), measure hit times from sub-detectors, the motherboard processes and stores them in a buffer, produces trigger primitives from different detectors and extracts only data related to the lowest trigger level decision, once this is taken on the basis of the trigger primitives themselves.
• The features of the TDCB board developed by the Pisa NA62 group are extensively discussed and performance data is presented in order to show its compliance with the experiment requirements.