Upgrade of the level-0 trigger system for BNL-E949

A new programmable trigger board and digital mean-timer modules using complex programmable logic device have been introduced to the trigger system of the BNL-E949 experiment. The online dead time was reduced from 4.0% to 1.7% by introducing an on-chip prescaler to the programmable trigger board. The acceptance loss of the online photon veto was reduced from 4.9% to 1.8% by introducing the mean-timer modules. Index Terms--Complex programmable logic device (CPLD), field-programmable gate array (FPGA), mean-timer, trigger.