NINO: An ultrafast low-power front-end amplifier discriminator for the time-of-flight detector in the ALICE experiment

An ultrafast front-end preamplifier-discriminator chip called NINO has been developed for use in the ALICE time-of-flight detector. The chip has eight channels. Each channel is designed with an amplifier with less than 1-ns peaking time, a discriminator with a minimum detection threshold of 10 fC and an output stage. The output pulse has minimum time jitter (less than 25 ps) on the front edge, and the pulsewidth is dependent of the input signal charge. Each channel consumes 27 mW, and the eight channels fit in a 2 x 4 mm(2) ASIC processed in IBM 0.25-mum CMOS technology.