The CDF level 2 calorimetric trigger upgrade

CDF 11 upgraded the calorimeter trigger to cope with the higher detector occupancy due to the increased Tevatron instantaneous luminosity (similar to 2.8 x 10(32) cm(-2) s(-1)). While the original system was implemented in custom hardware and provided to the L2 trigger a limited-quality jet clustering performed using a reduced resolution measurement of the transverse energy in the calorimeter trigger towers, the upgraded system provides offline-quality jet reconstruction of the full resolution calorimeter data. This allows to keep better under control the dependence of the trigger rates on the instantaneous luminosity and to improve the efficiency and purity of the trigger selections. The upgraded calorimeter trigger uses the general purpose VME board Pulsar, developed at CDF 11 and already widely used to upgrade the L2 tracking and L2 decision systems. A battery of Pulsars is used to merge and send the calorimeter data to the L2 CPUs, where software-implemented algorithms perform offline-like clustering. In this paper we review the design and the performance of the upgraded system. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.