Front-end electronics for the ALICE calorimeters

Abstract

The ALICE calorimeters PHOS and EMCal are based on Avalanche Photo-Diode (APD) photosensors with Charge Sensitive Preamplifiers (CSP) for readout of the scintillating elements. The amplified signals are read out via 32-channel shaper/digitizer front-end electronics (FEE) with 14-bit effective dynamic range. The electronics is based on second order shapers with dual gain for each channel, getting digitized by ALTRO chips. Each APD channel is equipped with an individual 10-bit APD gain adjustment and 2 × 2 channel clusters generate a 100 ns shaped analog sums output (Fast OR) for the associated Trigger Region Units (TRU). The Fast OR signals are generated by first order shapers with a dynamic range of 12-bit given by the ADC in the TRU cards. Board controller firmware in the FPGA provides local monitoring and configuration of all parameters via the ALICE DCS system. The signal to noise ratio for MIP at 215 MeV is ∼ 7 per channel with a noise level of 30 MeV at room temperature for a dynamic range of 80 GeV for PHOS, and the fast-OR RMS noise level is about 75 MeV for a dynamic range of 250 GeV for EMCal.