GAPS time of flight SiPM preamp
Low mass, low power, fast electronics for the GAPS trigger
I worked with four engineers and a project scientist to design, develop, qualify/test a silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) preamplifier for photon pulses produced by plastic scintillator (each scintillator detector is 1.8 m 6.35 mm). The preamp provides a gain of and enough current drive for the signal to be sampled downstream.
The SiPM preamp is a custom design: cathode outputs of six sensors are summed and passed through a transimpedance stage. This output is split before being sent to the final current feedback stage. One higher gain output is used for measurements while the other low gain output is used for triggering.
To achieve highest possible the end-to-end timing resolution should be as high as possible. With the fourth generation boards we are able to exceed the requirement of 500 ps.
