Multichannel analog front-end and analog-to-digital converter ICs for silicon photomultipliers

Integrated circuit (IC) of multichannel analog front-end and a mixed-signal chip of multichannel analog-to-digital converter are presented. A chipset of these two ICs is intended for readout, analog preprocessing and analog to digital conversion of silicon photomultiplier array signals. The number of channels of the analog front-end IC as well as the types of their input stages depends on the application. The current test version of the chip contains three current-input channels and three voltage-input channels. Each of the channels includes a programmable pre-amplifier, integrator with baseline-holder, code-controlled amplifier, amplitude discriminator, two programmable timers, pulse-shaping low-pass filter, peak detector, and an output buffer with baseline tuning circuitry. The analog IC has code-configurable architecture. The mixed-signal IC includes nine main channels and one auxiliary channel, containing 10-bit analog-to-digital converter in each channel. It also has a buffer memory and a voltage reference. The chip features low power consumption, which is less than 0.5 mW per channel at a sampling rate of 100 kHz. Both ICs are implemented in 0.35 mu m CMOS technology.