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This paper presents a design of low power and low noise, high speed readout front-end system for semiconductor detectors. The architecture comprises a folded cascode charge sensitive amplifier with gain enhancement, a pole-zero cancellation circuit and a complex shaper circuit with Gm-C topology. A local feedback amplifier based on a wide swing gain boosting scheme with dc level shifting has been used. The system has been fabricated in a 0.13-µm CMOS technology with a single 1.2-V supply voltage. Experimental results show the flexibility of the system where the key parameters, such as decay time, charge gain and peaking time can be tuned. For a nominal peaking time of 150 ns the power consumption of the entire channel is less than 5 mW. A power consumption-low noise tradeoff will be considered to match a detector capacitance of 5 pF. The output pulse has a peak amplitude of 200 mV for a charge of 10 fC from the detector and achieves a linearity better than 1% up to an input charge range of 12 fC.

A high speed, low power and programmable readout front-end system is presented for silicon detectors to be used in nuclear physics applications. The architecture consists of a folded cascode charge sensitive amplifier, a pole-zero cancellation circuit to eliminate undershoots and a shaper circuit with Gm-C topology. All building blocks include a regulated cascode technique based gain enhancement. Experimental results show that the whole front-end system can be programmed for peaking times of 100 ns, 200 ns and 400 ns maintaining the amplitude of the output voltage. Programmability is achieved by switching different resistors for all poles and zeros. The system has been designed in a 130 nm CMOS technology and powered from a 1.2 V supply. The output pulse has peak amplitude of 200 mV for an input energy of 5 MeV from the detector. A power consumption low noise tradeoff will be considered.