Data Acquisition in Particle Physics Experiments

Generally speaking, most of the particle physics experiments incur in the use of different types of sensors which information has to be gathered and processed to extract the biggest semantic contents about the process being analyzed. This fact implies the need for, not only a hardware coordination (timing, data width, speeds, etc.) between different sub-acquisition systems for the different types of sensors, but also an information processing strategy to gain more significance from the analysis of the data from the whole system that the one got from a single type of sensor. Also, from the point of view of hardware resources, each type of sensor is replicated several times (even millions) to achieve some spatial coverage. This fact directly drives to the extensive use of integrated devices when needed to improve cost and space utilization.