Abstract:

A short overview of existing neuromorphic hardware is given as well as the physics projects making use of them. As a concrete example we describe an innovative project within the H1-Experiment at the electron-proton collider HERA is described, instrumenting hardwired neural networks as pattern recognition machines to disciminate between wanted physics and uninteresting background at the trigger level. The decision time of the system is less than 20 microseconds, typical for a modern second level trigger. The neural trigger has been successfully running for the past four years and has turned out new physics results from H1 unobtainable so far with other triggering schemes. We describe the concepts and the technical realization of the neural network trigger system, present the status and the most important physical results, and motivate an upgrade of the system for the future high luminosity running at HERA. The upgrade concentrates on intelligent pre-processing of the neural inputs. We present the physical principles and the underlying algorithms of the pre-processing step, which is required to be executed in less than 8 microseconds.

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