Conceptual Design of a Multi-Channel Distributed Receiver Electronics for Photomultipliers and Gas Detectors

In this paper, we present a new concept of ASIC-based receiver electronics, specifically designed for particle detectors with multiple analog channels. The electronics will include both analog and digital parts. The analog unit will contain a tunable low-noise transimpedance amplifier with variable input impedance (10 – 100 Ω) followed by a pipelined SAR ADC with programmable resolution (7 – 10 bit) and sampling rates (up to 1 GS/s), as well as a time-to-digital converter (target resolution ≤ 20 ps). The digital unit, will act as a data concentrator, and can interface up to 64 analog channels. It extracts various features from the digitized input signal (e.g. Time-over-Threshold, Time-of-Arrival, signal samples, wavelets, etc.), concentrates the data to reduce the bandwidth and stream the data to the central data unit. In this concept, two types of data interfaces are proposed for data streaming. Currently, 28 nm CMOS technology has been selected for prototyping, but other technology nodes might be used in the future.