Front-End Electronics and Feature-Extraction Algorithm for the PANDA Electromagnetic Calorimeter

The PANDA collaboration at FAIR, Germany, will employ antiproton annihilations to investigate yet undiscovered charm-mesons and glueballs aiming to unravel the origin of hadronic masses. A multi-purpose detector for tracking, calorimetry and particle identification is presently being developed to run at high luminosities providing up to 2.107 interactions/s. A trigger-less data-acquisition system will be employed with sub-detectors continuously providing data from incoming physics events. This paper describes readout electronics and the treatment of the digitised preamplifier signal for the Electromagnetic Calorimeter. The use of a Sampling ADC in the readout allows to achieve the design goals, namely a large dynamic range from 1 MeV to 10 GeV, a count-rate dependent low trigger threshold of about 1-3 MeV, and a time resolution better than 1 ns.