Speaker
Description
The Front-End Link eXchange (FELIX) system is an interface between the trigger and detector electronics and commodity switched networks for the ATLAS experiment at CERN and other experiments. The detector and trigger electronic systems of the ATLAS experiment are largely custom and fully synchronous with respect to the 40.08 MHz clock of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The FELIX system uses FPGAs on server-hosted PCIe boards to pass data between custom data links connected to the detector and trigger electronics and host system memory over a PCIe interface then route data to network clients via a dedicated software platform running on these machines. The FELIX approach takes advantage of modern FPGAs and commodity computing to reduce the system complexity and effort needed to support data acquisition systems in comparison to previous designs.