SPIROC: design and performances of a dedicated very front-end electronics for an ILC Analog Hadronic CALorimeter (AHCAL) prototype with SiPM read-out

For the future e+ e- International Linear Collider (ILC) the ASIC SPIROC (Silicon Photomultiplier Integrated Read-Out Chip) was designed to read out the Analog Hadronic Calorimeter (AHCAL) equipped with Silicon Photomultiplier (SiPM). It is an evolution of the FLC_SiPM chip designed by the OMEGA group in 2005. SPIROC2 [1] was realized in AMS SiGe 0.35 mu m technology [2] and developed to match the requirements of large dynamic range, low noise, low consumption, high precision and large number of read-out channels. This ASIC is a very front-end read-out chip that integrates 36 self triggered channels with variable gain to achieve charge and time measurements. The charge measurement must be performed from 1 up to 2000 photo-electrons (p. e.) corresponding to 160 fC up to 320 pC for SiPM gain 10(6). The time measurement is performed with a coarse 12-bit counter related to the bunch crossing clock (up to 5 MHz) and a fine time ramp based on this clock (down to 200 ns) to achieve a resolution of 1 ns. An analog memory array with a depth of 16 for each channel is used to store the time information and the charge measurement. The analog memory content (time and charge) is digitized thanks to an internal 12-bit Wilkinson ADC. The data is then stored in a 4kbytes RAM. A complex digital part is necessary to manage all these features and to transfer the data to the DAQ. SPIROC2 is the second generation of the SPIROC ASIC family designed in 2008 by the OMEGA group. A very similar version (SPIROC2c) was submitted in February 2012 to improve the noise performance and also to integrate a new TDC (Time to Digital Converter) structure. This paper describes SPIROC2 and SPIROC2c ASICs and illustrates the main characteristics thank to a series of measurements.