Trends in new collider experiment data acquisition systems

Abstract

New collider projects such as the SLC and the Tevatron in the States, or LEP in Europe are underway and future generation machines are under consideration for investigation of the TeV domain of high energy physics. Spectrometers at these facilities are of growing size and complexity due to both the increase in energy and the introduction of new detection techniques. The resulting trigger and data acquisition systems have to treat enormous data volumes. New approaches have to be adopted to deal with the collection and filtering of event data. The availability of high performance micro- and specialised processors and of high speed modular bus systems allows the design of data acquisition architectures which are versatile and powerful enough to ensure safe event collection in a form suitable for prompt analysis of new physics processes.