Monolithic circuits for barium fluoride detectors used in nuclear physics experiments. CRADA final report

Custom monolithic electronic circuits have been developed recently for large detector applications in high energy physics where subsystems require tens of thousands of channels of signal processing and data acquisition. In the design and construction of these enormous detectors, it has been found that monolithic circuits offer significant advantages over discrete implementations through increased performance, flexible packaging, lower power and reduced cost per channel. Much of the integrated circuit design for the high energy physics community is directly applicable to intermediate energy heavy-ion and electron physics. This STTR project conducted in collaboration with researchers at the Holifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility (HRIBF) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, sought to develop a new integrated circuit chip set for barium fluoride (BaF{sub 2}) detector arrays based upon existing CMOS monolithic circuit designs created for the high energy physics experiments. The work under the STTR Phase 1 demonstrated through the design, simulation, and testing of several prototype chips the feasibility of using custom CMOS integrated circuits for processing signals from BaF{sub 2} detectors. Function blocks including charge-sensitive amplifiers, comparators, one shots, time-to-amplitude converters, analog memory circuits and buffer amplifiers were implemented during Phase 1 effort. Experimental results from bench testing and laboratory testing with sources were documented.