A 15Â GSa/s, 1.5Â GHz bandwidth waveform digitizing ASIC

The PSEC4 custom integrated circuit was designed for the recording of fast waveforms for use in large-area time-of-flight detector systems. The ASIC has been fabricated using the IBM-8RF 0.13μm CMOS process. On each of the six analog channels, PSEC4 employs a switched capacitor array (SCA) of 256 samples deep, a ramp-compare ADC with 10.5 bits of DC dynamic range, and a serial data readout with the capability of region-of-interest windowing to reduce dead time. The sampling rate can be adjusted between 4 and 15 Gigasamples/second (GSa/s) on all channels and is servo-controlled on-chip with a low-jitter delay-locked loop (DLL). The input signals are passively coupled on-chip with a −3 dB analog bandwidth of 1.5 GHz. The power consumption in quiescent sampling mode is less than 50 mW/chip; at a sustained trigger and a readout rate of 50 kHz the chip draws 100 mW. After fixed-pattern pedestal subtraction, the uncorrected integral non-linearity is 0.15% over a 750 mV dynamic range. With a linearity correction, a full 1 V signal voltage range is available. The sampling timebase has a fixed-pattern non-linearity with an RMS of 13%, which can be corrected for precision waveform feature extraction and timing.