Performance of an Electronic Track-Finding Processor for the Level-1 Muon Trigger of the CMS Experiment

We report on the performance of an electronic track-finding processor that reconstructs in real-time 3-D tracks in the Cathode Strip Chambers (CSCs) of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment which is currently under construction at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This processor forms part of the Level-1 muon trigger of CMS, which identifies proton collisions using custom electronics for further analysis by an online computer cluster while reducing the event rate from 40 MHz to 100 kHz. The track-finding processor is implemented using field-programmable gate-arrays and SRAM look-up tables. A pre-production prototype was included into the trigger path during a series of tests at CERN where dedicated CSCs were exposed to an LHC time-structured muon beam and where CSCs installed on the CMS endcap disks were exposed to cosmic-rays. Final production of the system is now complete and all modules have passed system tests. An overview of the Level-1 trigger system and results on the efficiency, time structure, and data validation of the track-finding processor are reported.