Speaker
Mr
Matteo Cardinali
(Helmholtz Institut Mainz)
Description
The future experiments of nuclear and particle physics are moving towards the high luminosity regime, in order to access suppressed processes like rare B decays and exotic charmonium resonances. In this scenario, high rate capability is a key requirement for electronics instrumentation, together with excellent timing resolutions for precise event reconstruction. The development of dedicated FrontEnd Electronics (FEE) for detectors has become increasingly challenging, as well as very demanding for costs and resources. The current trend in R&D is towards multipurpose FEE which can be easily adapted to a great variety of detectors, without impairing the required high performance.
We report on high precision timing solutions based on customised FEE cards. The design utilises high-bandwidth pre-amplifiers and fast discriminators providing LVDS output signals, which can be directly fed into the TRBv3 readout using FPGA-TDCs with a precision better than 11 ps RMS. The discriminators also provide time-over-threshold information which can be used for charge measurements or walk corrections thus improving the obtainable timing resolution. Two types of cards were considered: one based on the NINO ASIC and the other, called PADIWA, on FPGA-based discriminators. Both types feature 16 channels per card.
The performances of the cards were investigated for two extreme applications: single photon signals, typical of imaging Cherenkov detectors, and charged particle signals, arising from plastic scintillators arrays. High counting rates per channel of several hundred KHz were achieved, and a timing resolution of better than 100 ps could be obtained in a test experiment with the full readout chain.
Primary author
Mr
Matteo Cardinali
(Helmholtz Institut Mainz)
