Trigger Merging Module for the J-PARC E16 Experiment.

An experiment to measure an invariant mass of $\phi $ mesons in nuclear medium is planned as the J-PARC E16 experiment. A trigger merging module (TRG-MRG) has been developed to detect leading-edges from 256 channels of discriminator-output signals and transmit those serialized hit data to trigger decision module with four optical links. The result of the test shows enough performance of the TRG-MRG as 1-ns time-to-digital converter (TDC) and data multiplexer with four 6.25 Gb/s transceivers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]