Front end electronics for the STAR TPC

The Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC (STAR) is a large acceptance detector now being built to study high energy heavy ion collisions. It detects charged particles with a large time projection chamber. The 136,600 TPC pads are instrumented with waveform digitizers, implemented in custom low noise preamplifier/shaper and switched capacitor array/ADCs ICs. The system is highly integrated with all analog functions mounted on small cards that plug into the TPC. Detector mounted readout boards multiplex data from 1152 channels onto a 1.5 Gbit/sec fiber optic link to the data acquisition system.

[1]  S. Kleinfelder,et al.  A monolithic CMOS 16 channel, 12 bit, 10 microsecond analog to digital converter integrated circuit , 1992, IEEE Conference on Nuclear Science Symposium and Medical Imaging.

[2]  E. Beuville,et al.  A low noise amplifier-shaper with tail correction for the STAR detector , 1995, 1995 IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium and Medical Imaging Conference Record.