The CDF Associative Memory for a Level-1 Tracking System at CMS

The CDF associative-memory device, AM, proven technology developed for the Silicon-Vertex-Trigger at the CDF experiment, is one of the proposed solutions at CMS for track reconstruction at Level-1 in the Super-LHC very high-luminosity conditions (100 proton-proton collisions every 12.5 ns, at 10³⁵ cm^-2 sec^-1). This luminosity requires a drastic revision of the existing trigger strategies. SVT is the most powerful tracker operated at a hadron collider so far. It is a unique example of on-line b-quark selection in HEP. The most CPU intensive part of the pattern recognition is solved by the AM device, where pre-calculated candidate tracks are stored. We propose the extension of the AM use to a pixel based Level-1 trigger for the super-LHC. The trigger is based on fast track reconstruction using the full pixel granularity. The trigger will implement the current CMS High Level Trigger functionality in a novel detector concept. A possible layout is discussed and performances are shown.