HLCI: A Front-End ASIC for Liquid Argon Calorimeters

We present a front-end ASIC for liquid argon calorime- ters. The preamplifier, of new concept, is based on a fully differen- tial amplifier with passive feedback and it provides at the same time very low noise programmable termination and single-ended to fully- differential conversion. The preamplifier feeds two fully-differential anti-aliasing bipolar shapers with differentgains, designed to achieve an overall dynamic range in excess of104 and characterized by very high output drive capability. The ASICis composed of eight front-end channels, three programmable summing channels for trigger primitives and a flexible signal generator.Designed and fabricated in a commercial 65nm CMOS technology, the ASIC is a candidate for the Phase 2 upgrade of the ATLAS LAr Calorimeter.