A 16 channel low noise amplifier shaper has been designed for the STAR particle detector of the RHIC accelerator. The STAR Amplifier-Shaper (SAS) includes a pole/zero network which cancels the long tail of the Time Projection Chamber (TPC) signal. The tail correction can be adjusted depending on the type of gas used in the TPC. The SAS equivalent noise charge is 900 e/sub RMS//sup -/,, with 25 pf detector capacitance (the test board having 7.7 pF of parasitic capacitance), and with 80 ns shaping time (step response). The measured noise slope is 13.7 e/sub RMS//sup -//pF. The shaper pulse FWHM is adjusted at 180 ns (detector response) with /spl plusmn/4% variation over the entire dynamic range. The shaping time and the tail correction are adjusted with external voltages using MOS resistors. The gain is 16 mV/fC with a linearity of 4%. The crosstalk is about 0.36% which have a negligible effect on the position resolution. The circuit also includes an on-chip calibration system in which the test input charge is controlled by a DC voltage. The output buffer drives a 2 V swing on 50 pF output load for a total power consumption of less than 750 mW (/spl plusmn/5 Volt supply). On-chip protection diodes have also been integrated. The full custom chip has been integrated in the CMOS ORBIT 1.2 /spl mu/m technology with double polysilicon capacitors.

The Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC (STAR) is a large acceptance detector now being built to study high energy heavy ion collisions. It detects charged particles with a large time projection chamber. The 136,600 TPC pads are instrumented with waveform digitizers, implemented in custom low noise preamplifier/shaper and switched capacitor array/ADCs ICs. The system is highly integrated with all analog functions mounted on small cards that plug into the TPC. Detector mounted readout boards multiplex data from 1152 channels onto a 1.5 Gbit/sec fiber optic link to the data acquisition system.

The Slow Controls System for the Solenoidal Tracker At RHIC (STAR) is presented. The application of the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) to this system is discussed. A prototype Hardware Controls system incorporating the High-level Data Link Control (HDLC) protocol has been developed and tested. This Controls system is used to provide a number of on-chamber control functions as well as an alternative path for accessing digitized detector data. Results from the preliminary system tests are presented. I. The STAR Experiment The STAR detector is located on the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The STAR experiment will investigate collisions between gold ions accelerated to 100 GeV per nucleon, searching for evidence of the transition of nuclear matter to a quark-gluon plasma state (1). The use of a Time Projection Chamber (TPC) will enable the STAR experiment to track thousands of particles per event as well as examine and correlate individual particle properties and global event variables. The STAR experiment will be on-line in early 1999.