The STAR TPC front end electronics

Abstract

The Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC (STAR) uses a large time projection chamber. Each of the 136,600 pads is instrumented with a waveform digitizer, implemented in custom low noise preamplifier/shaper and switched capacitor array/ADCs ICs. The system is highly integrated with all analog functions mounted on small cards that plug into the TPC. Detector mounted readout boards multiplex data from 1152 channels onto a 1.5 Gbit/sec fiber optic link to the data acquisition system