Speaker
Description
ull waveform digitization is an obvious solution for many particle physics detectors: Nyquist sampling ensures no information is lost, and extraction of important features can be postponed to later offline analysis, or can even be done by a fast FPGA before storage to disk. For photon detectors used in large-scale neutrino physics, however, the dynamic ranges run from just single photons to perhaps a few thousand per channel, and we are interested only in the number of photons each sensor detected and their arrival times. I will describe here an "Analog Photon Processor" (APP) ASIC, being designed for the TSMC 65 nm process, that extracts the features necessary to do precision photon counting and time measurement, even in the case of multiple photons piled up on a single waveform. The APP does this by fast analog measurements, allowing system bandwidths to be increased and thus precision improved, while significantly reducing data volumes and cost. The APP will be particularly useful for future hybrid Cherenkov/scintillation detectors, such as the proposed Theia detector which is a candidate for DUNE's FD4 module.
