Development of Fast, Low Power 8-Channel Amplifier-Discriminator Board for the RPCs

摘要

134.1 Introduction ICAL is a magnetized Iron-Calorimeter to be set up by the India based Neutrino Observatory (INO) collaboration for studying neutrinos. ICAL will study atmospheric neutrinos using magnetized iron as its target mass and glass Resistive Plate Chambers (RPCs) as the active detector elements [1]. RPC detector signals are of 1-5mV in amplitude, and with rise time of the order of 1 ns. Hence the pulse profiles are extremely narrow, viz., 5-10 ns. The preamplifier should accept single ended input current signals, should have suitable gain with peaking time of 1 ns or less and there should also be a discriminator with threshold in the range of fC to pC. ICAL will have about 3.6 million detector channels and its engineering module will have about 50,000 channels. So, the power consumption per channel should be very low, besides ensuring small form-factor of the preamplifier board in order to minimize the dead area in the detector.