The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is the next generation ground-based very high energy gamma-ray observatory. The Large-Sized Telescope (LST) of CTA targets 20 GeV -1 TeV gamma rays and has 1855 photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) installed in the focal plane camera. With the 23 m mirror dish, the night sky background (NSB) rate amounts to several hundreds MHz per pixel. In order to record clean images of gamma-ray showers with minimal NSB contamination, a fast sampling of the signal waveform is required so that the signal integration time can be as short as the Cherenkov light flash duration (a few ns). We have developed a readout board which samples waveforms of seven PMTs per board at a GHz rate. Since a GHz FADC has a high power consumption, leading to large heat dissipation, we adopted the analog memory ASIC "DRS4". The sampler has 1024 capacitors per channel and can sample the waveform at a GHz rate. Four channels of a chip are cascaded to obtain deeper sampling depth with 4096 capacitors. After a trigger is generated in a mezzanine on the board, the waveform stored in the capacitor array is subsequently digitized with a low speed (33 MHz) ADC and transferred via the FPGAbased Gigabit Ethernet to a data acquisition system. Both a low power consumption (2.64 W per channel) and high speed sampling with a bandwidth of >300 MHz have been achieved. In addition, in order to increase the dynamic range of the readout we adopted a two gain system achieving from 0.2 up to 2000 photoelectrons in total. We finalized the board design for the first LST and proceeded to mass production. Performance of produced boards are being checked with a series of quality control (QC) tests. We report the readout board specifications and QC results.
A Front End ASIC for the readout of Silicon Photo-Multipliers is presented with the following features: wide dynamic range, high speed, multi channel, low input impedance current preamplifier, low power (7mW per channel), DC coupled input with common mode voltage control and separated timing and charge signal output.A detailed description of the SiPM modeling and parameter extraction is also included allowing the emulation of the signal generated by different commercial devices in the design simulation stage. Current prototype is the first step for a more complex mixed signal design including more channels, analog processing and digital outputs, thus reducing power consumption and increasing integration. This prototype includes basic blocks for 3 channels with: preamplifier with two separate signal paths and fast current discriminator with digital output.
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