Development of a dedicated front-end electronics for straw tube trackers in the P̄ANDA experiment

The design and tests of front-end electronics for straw tube trackers in the PANDA experiment at FAIR are presented. The challenges for the front-end electronics, comprising operation at high counting rate up to 1MHz per straw tube, are discussed and the proposed architecture comprising a switched gain charge sensitive preamplifier (CSP), a pole-zero cancellation circuit (PZC), a second order variable peaking time shaper, a trimming ion tail cancellation circuit, and a baseline holder (BLH), is described. The front-end provides an analogue output and a discriminator with LVDS differential driver for the Time-of-Arrival (ToA) and Time-over-Threshold (ToT) measurements. A prototype readout ASIC featuring four channels was fabricated in 0.35 mu m CMOS technology consuming 15.5 mW (analog part) and 12 mW (LVDS) per channel. The results of measurements of peaking time (25-67 ns), gain, noise (ENC 800-2500 el. for various gains), time walk and jitter are presented as well as the first results obtained with prototype straw tubes connected.