BASIC32: A New ASIC for Silicon Photomultiplier Detectors

Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPM) have shown to be excellent substitutes for more traditional and bulky Photomultiplier Tubes (PMT) in many photon detection applications, thanks essentially to their high quantum efficiency, lowbias voltage and immunity to magnetic fields.However, they pose some challenging design constraints on the design of the electronic front-end (FE) due to their intrinsic high gain and speed. In particular, when changing from low to high light levels of exposition, they produce output signals whose amplitude may span over about three order of magnitude with rise times of less than 1 ns. This is of particular concern when developing integrated multichannel electronics in deep submicron technology. We report here on the realization of a 32-channel ASIC in CMOS technology, based on an innovative current-mode architecture. Besides presenting the experimental results of the ASIC characterization, some perspective indications are given concerning the work currently in progress.