J. Sinclair

Multi-channel front-end board for SiPM readout

We describe a novel high-speed front-end electronic board (FEB) for interfacing an array of 32 Silicon Photo-multipliers (SiPM) with a computer. The FEB provides individually adjustable bias for the SiPMs, and performs low-noise analog signal amplification, conditioning and digitization. It provides event timing information accurate to 1.3 ns RMS. The signal-to-noise ratio of 12 is attained for the first photo-electron peak. The back-end data interface is realized on the basis of 100 Mbps Ethernet. The design allows daisy-chaining of up to 256 units into one network interface, thus enabling compact and efficient readout schemes for multi-channel scintillating detectors, using SiPMs as photo-sensors.