Readout of scintillating plastic fibers with an APD array and prototype ASIC

Abstract

We report on the development of custom front-end electronics for use with avalanche photodiode (APD) arrays as part of a NASA technology study for the readout of scintillating plastic fibers. APD arrays featuring 64 1 mm square pixels are used. We demonstrate that a pixel of these APD arrays coupled to relatively thin (0.25 mm) and short (15 cm) scintillating plastic fibers can be used to detect and measure the tracks of even minimum ionizing particles. An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) implementation of the electronics is required to produce a detector sufficiently compact for practical use in a space flight experiment featuring many thousands of channels. This paper briefly describes the detector concept and performance and presents the design and performance of a four-channel prototype ASIC fabricated using the 0.35 /spl mu/ Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) process.

Department

Space Science Center

Publication Date

8-2003

Journal Title

IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science

Publisher

IEEE

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1109/TNS.2003.815108

Document Type

Article

Rights

©2003 IEEE

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