Title: "The eXtremely Fast Tracker at CDF II"

Abstract:

The CDF II eXtremely Fast Tracker (XFT) is the trigger track processor which reconstructs charged particle tracks based upon information from the CDF~II central tracking chamber. A large portion of the CDF physics program is based the XFT system. The Tevatron bunch crossing period is 396ns, and the XFT finds charged tracks with transverse momentum above 1.5 GeV/c on every bunch crossing. To handle the high instantaneous luminosity delivered by the Fermilab Tevatron, we have upgraded the XFT system to utilze additional information from the stereo layers of the central tracking chamber. In this presentation, we will describe the design and implementation of the front-end for the XFT upgrade system, which is used to instrument about 12,000 channels of the central tracker. This includes a time-to-digital converter with 2ns resolution with a pipelined data storage system followed by fiber optic data trasmission. We will report on the design, construction, installation, commissioning and performance of this system.