Digital Electronics
The digital electronics group of the department for experiment electronics is working on the design (schematics) and after layout and production of the module with the programming of mainly digital electronics in close collaboration with the physics experiment groups at GSI. For these tasks very often Field Programmable Gate Arrays are used on the developed devices, which can fulfil any digital function in parallel and very fast and which can change this function via reprogramming the device. The functions include the analog to digital conversion in external devices, the readout of ASICs and the transport of the data with protocols like Ethernet or custom protocols to minimize the latency. Additionally, very precise time measurements are needed for many detector systems to identify particles. Also for this FPGAs are used, which can be programmed in a very special way to achieve a time difference measurement precision of ~10ps RMS for many channels.
Beispielprojekte
HADES/CBM RICH Auslese
![[Translate to English:] G. Otto](/fileadmin/_processed_/b/4/csm_full_rich_dimenstion_c3b543fe7a.jpg)
The picture shows the readout electronics of the RICH detector of experiment HADES at GSI.
The mounted electronics is a collaborative development of CBM/HADES/PANDA and Experiment Electronics department. It is based upon FPGA-TDCs with a timing precision of <20ps RMS. By means of this readout electronics. 28.000 channels of multi-anode photo multipliers have been digitized.
CBM-TOF Auslese
The eTOF (Endcap Time of Flight) detector of STAR experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory uses the CBM-TOF electronics for readout that has been developed and build in the GSI Experiment Electronics department.
KILOM1 Modul zur Auslese von z.B. hochkanaligen PMTs
The KILOM1 (KINTEX Logic Module) is a 128 channel Time-to-Digital-Converter (TDC), with a time precision of 175 ps RMS, including the PADI front-end (developed at GSI for CBM-TOF) for amplification and discrimination, connected to a Hamamatsu 256 channel MA-PMT. It is in use for experiment R3B in the "fibre tracking detector".
DiRICH: MCP-/MA-PMT Auslese für CBM/PANDA/HADES
![[Translate to English:] G. Otto](/fileadmin/EE/Digitalelektronik/dirich_system_03_280716.jpg)
The DiRICH is a compact system for reading out MCP-/MA-PMTs. The picture shows a module which provides amplification, discrimination, digitization (FPGA-TDC withh time precision of 12 ps RMS) and data acquisition for 6 MA-PMTs (384 channels). This development is a cooperation between the experiments CBM, HADES, PANDA and the GSI Experiment Elektronics department.