High-performance Front-end Electronics Research Articles

The front end electronics for the drift chamber readout in MEG experiment upgrade

Front-end electronics plays an essential role in drift chambers for time resolution and, therefore, spatial resolution. The use of cluster timing techniques, by measuring the arriving times of all the individual ionization clusters after the first one, may enable to reach resolutions even below 100 μm in the measurement of the impact parameter. A high performance front-end electronics, characterized by low distortion, low noise and a wide bandwidth has been developed with the purpose to implement cluster timing techniques in the new drift chamber for the upgrade of the MEG experiment at Paul Sherrer Institut (CH) [1].

A New Simple and Effective Procedure for SiPM Electrical Parameter Extraction

Silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) are emerging semiconductor-based photosensors, addressing the challenge of low-light detection down to the single-photon counting level. A design of high-performance front-end electronics for SiPM readout requires the development of accurate electrical models. Numerous SiPM reliable models have matured in recent years; however, circuit parameter extraction is rather cumbersome and involves extensive measurement steps to be performed. Starting from a recently developed model of the SiPM device coupled to the conditioning electronics, a new effective analytical procedure is, here, devised for extracting the SiPM model parameters from experimental measurements. The proposed extraction technique is applied to a $3\times 3$ -mm2 SiPM sensor, and is validated by comparing SPICE simulations and measurement results. Independent cross-check validation based on experimental tests corroborates the effectiveness of the adopted extraction procedure.

A high performance Front End Electronics for drift chamber readout in MEG experiment upgrade

Front End (FE) Electronics plays an essential role in Drift Chambers (DC) for time resolution and, therefore, spatial resolution. The use of cluster timing techniques, by measuring the timing of all the individual ionization clusters after the first one, may enable to reach resolutions even below 100μm in the measurement of the impact parameter. To this purpose, a Front End Electronics with a wide bandwidth and low noise is mandatory in order to acquire and amplify the drift chamber signals.

The TOFp/pVPD time-of-flight system for STAR

A time-of-flight system was constructed for the STAR Experiment for the direct identification of hadrons produced in 197Au+ 197Au collisions at RHIC. The system consists of two separate detector subsystems, one called the Pseudo Vertex Position Detector (pVPD, the “start” detector) and the other called the Time of Flight Patch (TOFp, the “stop” detector). Each detector is based on conventional scintillator/phototube technology and includes custom high-performance front-end electronics and a common CAMAC-based digitization and read-out. The design of the system and its performance during the 2001 RHIC run will be described. The start resolution attained by the pVPD was 24 ps, implying a pVPD single-detector resolution of 58 ps. The total time resolution of the system averaged over all detector channels was 87 ps, allowing direct π/ K/ p discrimination for momenta up to ∼1.8 GeV/ c, and direct ( π+ K)/ p discrimination up to ∼3 GeV/ c.

High-performance front-end electronics for frequency-modulated continuous-wave interferometers

A high-performance analog electronic circuit for processing the signal from an absolute distance meter based on a frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) interferometer is presented. The front-end electronics includes a derivative block followed by a the time-variant baseline restoration of the photodetector current. A high signal-to-noise ratio is ensured by avoiding the use of a resistive transimpedance preamplifier and subsequent voltage processing. The paper details the electrical scheme of the preprocessing chain as well as the experimental results from an actual prototype of a distance meter.