A collaborative HDL management tool for ATLAS L1Calo upgrades

Abstract

Coordinating firmware development among many international collaborators is becoming a very widespread problem in particle physics. Guaranteeing firmware synthesis with place and route (P&R) reproducibility and assuring traceability of binary files is of paramount importance. Our HDL managing tool, developed in Python and tightly integrated with CERN Gitlab and Xilinx Vivado, tackles these issues by exploiting advanced Git features and by paying particular attention to Intellectual Property handling. In LHC Run-3, the ATLAS L1Calo Trigger system will be upgraded with new feature extraction and readout modules and our tool is used for the firmware development for these modules.