Fast Frontend Electronics for high luminosity particle detectors

Future experiments of nuclear and particle physics are moving towards the high luminosity regime, in order to access suppressed processes like rare B decays or exotic charmonium resonances. In this scenario, high rate capability is a key requirement for electronics instrumentation, together with excellent timing resolution for precise event reconstruction. The development of dedicated FrontEnd Electronics (FEE) for detectors has become increasingly challenging. A current trend in R&D is towards multipurpose FEE which can be easily adapted to a great variety of detectors, without impairing the required high performance. We report on high-precision timing solutions which utilise high-bandwidth preamplifiers and fast discriminators providing Time-over-Threshold information, which can be used for charge measurements or walk corrections thus improving the obtainable timing resolution. The output signal are LVDS and can be directly fed into a multi-hit TDC readout. The performance of the electronics was investigated for single photon signals, typical for imaging Cherenkov detectors. The opposite condition of light signals arising from plastic scintillators, was also studied. High counting rates per channel of several MHz were achieved, and a timing resolution of better than 100 ps could be obtained in a test experiment using the full readout chain.