A High Time Resolution and Low-Power ASIC for MRPC Applications

The structure of readout circuits needs to be improved to meet the requirements of the endcap time of flight upgrade with multi-gap resistive plate chamber (MRPC) in Beijing Spectrometer III experiments, posing a demand for the high time resolution and low-power electronics. Considering MRPC features, an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) called FEEWAVE, which integrates the front-end circuit and digitization function, is proposed to meet the above requirements. The front-end circuit implements I/V conversion and signal amplification. To reduce power consumption and further improve the time resolution, the waveform sampling technique based on switch capacitor array is adopted. A 30 fC to 1.2 pC input signal dynamic range is obtained, and the jitter is less than 21 ps rms. At the same time, the chip realizes 5 GSPS (gigabit samples per second) sampling rate, trigger rate capability of 50 kHz and 25 mW/channel power consumption. The 6-channel ASIC has been designed and taped out with 0.18 $$\upmu $$m complementary metal oxide semiconductor technology. The preliminary test results of FEEWAVE have been achieved.