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Large-Area Picosecond Photo-Detectors (LAPPDs) show great potential for expanding the performance envelope of Micro-Channel Plates (MCPs) to areas of up to 20×20 cm and larger. Such scaling introduces new challenges, including how to meet the electronics readout burden of ever larger area MCPs. One solution is to replace the traditional grid anode used for readout with a microwave stripline anode, thus allowing the channel count to scale with MCP width rather than area. However, stripline anodes introduce new issues not commonly dealt with in grid-anodes, especially as their length increases. One of these issues is the near simultaneous arrival of multiple photons on the detector, creating possible confusion about how to reconstruct their arrival times and positions. We propose a maximum a posteriori solution to the problem and verify its performance in simulated scintillator and water-Cherenkov detectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The PSEC4 custom integrated circuit was designed for the recording of fast waveforms for use in large-area time-of-flight detector systems. The ASIC has been fabricated using the IBM-8RF CMOS process. On each of the six analog channels, PSEC4 employs a switched capacitor array (SCA) of 256 samples deep, a ramp-compare ADC with 10.5 bits of DC dynamic range, and a serial data readout with the capability of region-of-interest windowing to reduce dead time. The sampling rate can be adjusted between 4 and 15Gigasamples/second (GSa/s) on all channels and is servo-controlled on-chip with a low-jitter delay-locked loop (DLL). The input signals are passively coupled on-chip with a −3dB analog bandwidth of 1.5GHz. The power consumption in quiescent sampling mode is less than 50mW/chip; at a sustained trigger and a readout rate of 50kHz the chip draws 100mW. After fixed-pattern pedestal subtraction, the uncorrected integral non-linearity is 0.15% over a 750mV dynamic range. With a linearity correction, a full 1V signal voltage range is available. The sampling timebase has a fixed-pattern non-linearity with an RMS of 13%, which can be corrected for precision waveform feature extraction and timing. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The Time-Of-Propagation detector is a Cherenkov particle identification detector based on quartz radiator bars for the Belle II experiment at the SuperKEKB e + e − − collider. The purpose of the detector is to identify the type of charged hadrons produced in e + e − − collisions, and requires a single photon timing resolution below 100 picoseconds. A novel front-end electronic system was designed, built, and integrated to acquire data from the 8192 microchannel plate photomultiplier tube channels in the detector. Waveform sampling of these analog signals is done by switched-capacitor array application-specific integrated circuits. The processes of triggering, digitization of windows of interest, readout, and data transfer to the Belle II data acquisition system are managed by Xilinx Zynq-7000 programmable system on a chip devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]