B. Denby et al., INVESTIGATION OF A VLSI NEURAL-NETWORK CHIP AS PART OF A SECONDARY VERTEX TRIGGER, Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment, 335(1-2), 1993, pp. 296-304
An analog VLSI neural network chip (ETANN) has been trained to detect
secondary vertices in simulated data for a fixed target heavy flavour
production experiment. The detector response and associative memory tr
ack finding were modelled by a simulation, but the vertex detection wa
s performed in hardware by the neural network chip and requires only a
few microseconds per event. The chip correctly tags 30% of the heavy
flavour events while rejecting 99% of the background, and is thus well
adapted for secondary vertex triggering applications. A general purpo
se VME module for interfacing the ETANN to experiments, equipped with
ADC/DAC circuits and a 68070 CPU, is also presented.