Topic description

1. Scientific context and motivation

In modern high energy physics experiments, the extremely precise measurement of particle time of arrival (with a resolution of the order of ten picoseconds) has become a crucial requirement to cope with high luminosity and event pile-up. The ultra-fast waveform digitization of the analogue signal has proved to be one of the most performant technique for time measurement, as illustrated by the SAMPIC family of integrated circuits.

Recently, the SPIDER ASIC was developed for the LHCb experiment (at CERN LHC accelerator), based on a multi-bank waveform digitizer with high trigger rate capability. Like SAMPIC, it is self-triggered but optimized for quasi-synchronous signals with respect to LHC clock. However, for most non-collider applications, the circuits must be able to capture signals with random time. This suggests the idea of a new circuit, able to sample the input continuou...