A new drift chamber TDC readout for the high intensity program of the NA48 experiment

A new read-out for the drift chambers (DCH) (8192 channels) of the NA48 experiment at CERN has been developed and realized by the Ferrara and Torino INFN sites and has taken data during the 2002 run. The core of the system is a set of 32 VME-9U Time-to-Digital-Converter boards (NA48-TDC). The NA48-TDCs record the time of arrival of signals from the DCH and store them in 40 MHz pipelined ring memories pending the trigger supervisor's decision. Dual memories and data extraction resources allow independent and simultaneous processing of level-1 and level-2 trigger requests. Time measurements are performed by the TDC-F1 commercial ASICs, having an intrinsic time resolution of 120 ps; and multi-hit capabilities. The NA48-TDC board features a maximum sustained rate of 500 kHz per channel. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.