HITS

Hardware Impulse Train Synthesizer

HITS is a real-time FPGA simulator of the ATLAS Tile Calorimeter readout. It runs at 40 MHz on a Terasic DE10-Nano and rebuilds the front-end signal chain in synthesizable Verilog: pseudo-random hits following the LHC bunch-train structure, energy amplitudes drawn from measured distributions, electronic noise, analog shaping and an embedded pole-zero cancellation. It lets the group validate online energy-reconstruction without access to the experiment.