Picosecond Resolution Analog Readout Board (DRS4FEM)
- BK Technology, LLC, Closter, NJ (United States)
BK Technology, LLC was funded to develop a 5Gs/s analog digitizer board capable of under 1ps timing resolution, driven by a common clock fan-out that allows synchronization of the timing at better than 5ps across boards separated by at least 10-20 meters. The board is based on the off-the-shelf DRS4 ASIC chip, a switch capacitor array ASIC developed at the PSI lab in Switzerland that has been verified to achieve 1 picosecond timing resolution with the appropriate calibration system. A DRS4 evaluation board provided by PSI has been used extensively by high-energy and nuclear physicists for lab tests. Our board significantly overcomes some of the major limitations of the evaluation board in several ways. By designing the board to support a local region of interest readout for the DRS4 ASIC, digitization time can be reduced such that the readout rate can be increased from a few hundred Hz to several 10s of kHz, with little dead time. A local region of interest readout also increases the trigger latency from 200 nanoseconds to several microseconds, since the interesting signal data above the threshold are digitized as they come in and stored in a digital buffer. Our design also utilizes an existing FPGA DAQ board to control the DRS4 ASIC; it was developed and fully tested for the PHENIX experiment at Brookhaven Lab. Using a common FPGA board allows clock propagation to be done from the board using ultra-high-speed, extremely low skew differential cables and a special PLL designed by engineers in Brookhaven’s accelerator division. Utilizing existing resources in our design reduces the technological complexity of our DRS4 board and increases the chance of success. We have performed board testing at our facility and Brookhaven National Laboratory.
- Research Organization:
- BK Technology, LLC, Closter, NJ (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES)
- DOE Contract Number:
- SC0018702
- OSTI ID:
- 1632809
- Type / Phase:
- SBIR (Phase I)
- Report Number(s):
- BK-2020; 2015774605
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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