Characterisation of a radiation hard front-end chip for the vertex detector of the LHCb experiment at CERN

The Beetle is a 128 channel analog pipelined readout chip which is intended for use in the silicon vertex locator (VELO) of the LHCb experiment at CERN. The Beetle chip is specially designed to withstand high radiation doses. Two Beetle1.1 chips bonded to a silicon strip detector have been tested with minimum ionizing particles. The main goal was to measure the signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio of the Beetle1.1 connected to a prototype VELO detector. Furthermore we investigated the general behaviour of the Beetle1.1. In this note we present the chip architecture, the measured (S/N) numbers as well as some characteristics (e.g. risetime, spillover) of the Beetle1.1 chip. Results from a total ionizing dose irradiation test are reported.