Bochum 1998 – scientific programme

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HK: Hadronen und Kerne

HK 13: Instrumentation II, Data Acquisition Systems

HK 13.4: Talk

Monday, March 16, 1998, 17:45–18:00, A

Read-out electronics for the CERES-TPC — •H. Tilsner, R. Baur, P. Ernst, G. Gramegna, M. Richter, and W. Seipp — Physikalisches Institut der Univ. Heidelberg, Philosophenweg 12, D-69120 Heidelberg

The CERES/NA45-Collaboration upgrades the existing spectrometer with a novel radial TPC-detector. We present the development of new front-end modules mounted on the detector and readout electronics for the DAC-system. The signals from the ionizing tracks are collected on a 16000 channel padplane. To each pad a charge sensitive amplifier with shaper and tail suppression is connected which offers selectable time constants to cope with various detector gases. During the drift-time of the chamber (30–70 µs) the preamplifier output is recorded at up to 15 MHz and 256 individual time samples are stored in a switched capacitor array (SCA) to allow a three dimensional reconstruction of the tracks. To meet the luminosity requirements of the experiment a total read-out time below 300 µs has to be achieved. The front-end modules, which contain the 16 channel preamplifier- and SCA-ASICs, are connected via optical links to receiver boards which perform zero-suppression and Huffman-encoding. The receiver boards transmit the compressed data to the memory modules which store the information of one event (≃ 200kByte). The memory modules are connected to the DAC-System by a PCI interface. Further processing includes central data recording at CERN Computer Centre.