Development of a High Resolution APD sased Animal PET and Multi-Channel Waveform Sampling Front-End ASIC

A new Waveform Sampling Front-End (WSFE) Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) for Positron Emission Tomography (PET) has been developed to digitize signals from scinti1lating crystals at anearly stage. Each channel of the chip consists of a preamplifier, a variable gain amplifier (VGA) anda fast Analog to Digital Converter (ADC). This aggressive approach to signal processing has several advantages over conventional method such as suppression of noise and flexibility in choice of signal processing methods while allowing many channels to be readout individually due to its low power consumption. Two such chips have been designed and experimental results are presented in this paper.