A versatile digital camera trigger for telescopes in the Cherenkov Telescope Array
U. Schwanke, M. Shayduk, K.-H. Sulanke, S. Vorobiov, R. Wischnewski

TL;DR
This paper presents a versatile FPGA-based digital camera trigger for Cherenkov telescopes, capable of efficiently selecting air shower images while suppressing background noise, with low power and cost, and adaptable to different energy ranges.
Contribution
The paper introduces a novel multi-stage FPGA-based camera trigger system that integrates space and time domain information for improved event detection in Cherenkov telescopes.
Findings
Prototype boards functioned properly in tests.
Full camera trigger can be built with 0.5 W power per channel.
Simulation shows improved response by combining multiple trigger algorithms.
Abstract
This paper describes the concept of an FPGA-based digital camera trigger for imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes, developed for the future Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). The proposed camera trigger is designed to select images initiated by the Cherenkov emission of extended air showers from very-high energy (VHE, E>20 GeV) photons and charged particles while suppressing signatures from background light. The trigger comprises three stages. A first stage employs programmable discriminators to digitize the signals arriving from the camera channels (pixels). At the second stage, a grid of low-cost FPGAs is used to process the digitized signals for camera regions with 37 pixels. At the third stage, trigger conditions found independently in any of the overlapping 37-pixel regions are combined into a global camera trigger by few central FPGAs. Trigger prototype boards based on Xilinx…
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