High speed low power FEE for silicon detectors in nuclear physics applications

A high speed, low power and programmable readout front-end system is presented for silicon detectors to be used in nuclear physics applications. The architecture consists of a folded cascode charge sensitive amplifier, a pole-zero cancellation circuit to eliminate undershoots and a shaper circuit with Gm-C topology. All building blocks include a regulated cascode technique based gain enhancement. Experimental results show that the whole front-end system can be programmed for peaking times of 100 ns, 200 ns and 400 ns maintaining the amplitude of the output voltage. Programmability is achieved by switching different resistors for all poles and zeros. The system has been designed in a 130 nm CMOS technology and powered from a 1.2 V supply. The output pulse has peak amplitude of 200 mV for an input energy of 5 MeV from the detector. A power consumption low noise tradeoff will be considered.