NINO: an ultrafast low-power front-end amplifier discriminator for the time-of-flight detector in the ALICE experiment

Abstract

Abstract-An ultrafast front-end preamplifier-discriminator chip called NINO has been developed for use in the ALICE time-of-flight detector. The chip has eight channels. Each channel is designed with an amplifier with less than 1-ns peaking time, a discriminator with a minimum detection threshold of 10 fC and an output stage. The output pulse has minimum time jitter (less than 25 ps) on the front edge, and the pulsewidth is dependent of the input signal charge. Each channel consumes 27 mW, and the eight channels fit in a 2 4 mm 2 ASIC processed in IBM 0.25-m CMOS technology.

Low-power amplifier-discriminators for high time resolution detection

“…Performances of this first circuit based on the specific NINO technique are summarized in Table I and detailed in [2].…”

“…This readout technique, detailed in [2] and shown in Fig. 1, is fully differential in order to obtain a large immunity against power supply noise and ground noise and the circuit can be efficiently used in differential or single ended mode.…”

“…The input currents are sensed by the input current-to-voltage converter which is based on a balanced common gate cascode stage, enabling a low input resistance on each circuit input [2]. For the readout of MRPC or of photomultipliers, which have high capacitance , this low input resistance (down to for the HCO circuit) permits to achieve high bandwidth, low crosstalk and to minimize signal reflection (by matching the circuit input to the resistance of the transmission line connecting the detector to the circuit).…”

“…This detector comprises Multi-gap Resistive Plate Chambers (MRPCs) [1] read out by electronic circuits called NINO. These front-end channels produce Low Voltage Differential Signals (LVDS) with less than 25 ps rms time jitter [2] and are read-out by time to digital converters [3]. An overall time-resolution of about 50 ps rms is achieved with this readout [4].…”

“…The NINO circuit developed for the ALICE experiment [2] already showed interesting potential for the readout of solid-state photon detectors for Positron Emission Tomography (PET) [9]. It also permits to readout MCP photomultipliers and to enhance performance in event timing and detector throughput for photon counting [10].…”