A Surface Mount Amplifier-Shaper-Discriminator and Preamplifier for the Fermilab CDF Tracking Chambers

A custom monolithic common base preamplifier chip was designed for Fermilab's Colliding Detector Facility Vertex Time Projection Chamber. The chip contains 4 preamplifiers on a single substrate. All of the associated circuitry as well as the preamplifiers are surface mounted on a thin printed circuit board to reduce the mass of the circuit. A low mass circuit is essential to reduce unwanted particle interactions with the circuit which could interfere with the physics seen by other layers of detectors. The Amplifier-Shaper-Discriminator (ASD) following the wire preamplifier was designed for use with several of the CDF Central Detector tracking chambers. Surface mount components are used extensively on the ASD's to reduce the number of circuit cards and number of crates in the system. Both the new preamplifier and the large scale use of surface mounted components reported in this paper are expected to find wide spread use in new detector electronics.