A New Multi Channel Front-End Board for TOF Experiments with Excellent Timing Resolution

A new integrated front-end electronics, based on a high resolution Time-to-Amplitude Converter ASIC chip (TAC), has been developed for time measurements in a time of flight experiment (RPC-detectors) of several thousand channels [1]. A sixteen channel board, named TACQUILA, with a time resolution of about 10ps RMS, has been built. It consists of a TAC stage and a 12 bit ADC for each channel followed by compact readout functionality[2]. To determine the charge of the detector pulses simultaneously to time measurement, an optional piggy-back board for TACQUILA with a QDC (Charge-to-Digital converter) has been designed. As time reference for the common stop setup, additionally a precision 40 MHz clock system has been developed. It is realized in LVDS standard and is distributed to the front-end electronics in a cascade up to three steps. It shows a jitter of about 5ps RMS measured at the TAC chip.