Front-end electronics for the tagger of the BGO-OD experiment

The BGO-OD experiment is intended for the systematic investigation of the photo-production of mesons off the nucleon. The experiment will use bremsstrahlung photons from an e− beam incident upon a thin radiator. The photon energy will be measured via the deflection of the electrons in the magnetic field of a photon tagger. FrED is a 16 channel double-threshold discriminator and shaper board designed as Front-End Electronics for the new Tagger detector of the experiment. It is a 6U-VME form factor card. The analog input stage has 1.7 GHz bandwidth. The output stage provides two LVDS signals with an expected jitter of ∼ 8 ps with respect to the input signal. The threshold settings are managed by a micro-controller which is remotely accessible through Ethernet.