A novel FPGA based online tracking algorithm for helix track reconstruction in a solenoidal field, developed for the PANDA spectrometer, is described. Employing the Straw Tube Tracker detector with 4636 straw tubes, the algorithm includes a complex track finder, and a track fitter. Implemented in VHDL, the algorithm is tested on a Xilinx Virtex-4 FX60 FPGA chip with different types of events, at different event rates. A processing time of 7 μs per event for an average of 6 charged tracks is obtained. The momentum resolution is about 3\% (4\%) for pt (pz) at 1 GeV/c. Comparing to the algorithm running on a CPU chip (single core Intel Xeon E5520 at 2.26 GHz), an improvement of 3 orders of magnitude in processing time is obtained. The algorithm can handle severe overlapping of events which are typical for interaction rates above 10 MHz.
@article{arxiv.1606.07306,
title = {FPGA Online Tracking Algorithm for the PANDA Straw Tube Tracker},
author = {Yutie Liang and Hua Ye and Martin J Galuska and Thomas Gessler and Wolfgang Kühn and Jens Sören Lange and Milan N Wagner and Zhen'an Liu and Jingzhou Zhao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.07306},
year = {2017}
}