The first prototypes of the front-end electronic of the ALICE silicon drift detectors has been designed and tested. The integrated circuits have been designed using state-of-theart technologies and, for the analog parts, with radiation-tolerant design techniques. In this paper, the test results of the building blocks of the PASCAL chip and the first prototype of the AMBRA chip are presented. The prototypes fully respect the ALICE requirements; owing to the use of deep-submicron technologies together with radiationtolerant layout techniques, the prototypes have shown a tolerance to a radiation dose much higher than the one foreseen for the ALICE environment. Summary The design of the readout electronic for the ALICE silicon drift detector is a very challenging task, due on one side to the huge amount of data produced by those detectors (256 10-bit words for each detector anode, in the case of the ALICE SDDs ) and on the other hand to the stringent constraints in term of space, power consumption and radiation hardness. The chosen architecture is based on 2 integrated circuits, PASCAL and AMBRA. It works in two different phases: during the acquisition phase the detector signal is amplified and stored into a fast analogue memory; when the trigger signal validates the data, the readout phase starts and the analogue information in the memory is