NTIMP1—A Fast Pulse Readout Chip With 1.2 V Power Supply Applied to the Diamond Detector in HIAF

Abstract

A very fast pulse readout ASIC, NTIMP1, with 1.2 V power supply is presented in this work. It is going to be used as front-end electronics (FEE) for reading out the diamond detector signals in the TOF (Time of Flight) wall of RIBLL2 experiment of the High Intensity Heavy Ion Accelerator Facility (HIAF), China. So that an 8-channel fast front-edge readout chip named as NTIMP1 is proposed in this work. Each channel of NTIMP1 has a high-bandwidth preamplifier (with adjustable thresholds) dealing with differential current input, a fast hysteresis discriminator, and a LVDS (Low-Voltage Differential Signaling) module ensuring long-distance signal transmission. Fabricated with 0.13 μm standard CMOS Technology, NTIMP1 can get an input ranging from 2 fC to 2000 fC and the input impedance of the preamplifier can be adjusted externally with an off-chip resistor, so as to match with the electrode impedance of diamond detector. The bandwidth of the preamplifier is 495.5 MHz, which allows a very short signal peaking time of no more than 1 ns. The jitter of the leading edge is lower than 15 ps with 100 fC input charge suggesting that NTIMP1 is suitable for high-resolution TOF measurement as well as time-slewing correction.