Abstract
The Large Hadron Collider will deliver up to 32 million physics collisions per second. This rate is far too high to be processed by present-day computer farms, let alone stored on disk by the experiments for offline analysis. A fast selection of interesting events must therefore be made. In the CMS experiment, this is implemented in two stages: the Level-1 Trigger of the CMS experiment uses custom-made, fast electronics, while the experiment's high-level trigger is implemented in computer farms. The Level-1 Global Trigger electronics has to receive signals from the subdetector systems that enter the trigger (mostly from muon detectors and calorimeters), synchronize them, determine if a pre-set trigger condition is fulfilled, check if the various subsystems are ready to accept triggers based on information from the Trigger Throttling System and on calculations of possible dead-times, and finally distribute the trigger decision (``Level-1 Accept'') together with timing signals to the subdetectors over the so-called ``Trigger, Timing and Control'' distribution tree of the experiment. These functions are fulfilled by several specialized, custom-made VME modules, most of which are housed in one crate. The overall control is exerted by the central ``Trigger Control System'', which is described in this paper. It consists of one main module and several ancillary boards for input and output functions.