A fast and versatile wire chamber space point finding processor

A four plane, four metre square, multiwire proportional counter at the CERN Omega spectrometer is used to digitize the spatial position of charged particles and generate a fast second level trigger. The coordinates of cluster centroids are fed into a modular space point finding processor which can analyse a ten particle event in 40 μs. The detector and the algorithms are described in the first part of this paper, the hardware implementation and the performance are then discussed. (orig.)