Noise limits in a front-end system based on time-over-threshold signal processing

An analog signal processor based on the Time-over-Threshold (ToT) range compression is employed in the front-end section of the readout chip of the microstrip vertex detector for the BaBar experiment. The paper, after describing the circuit solutions that have been adopted to optimize the ToT operation, focuses on the noise aspects of the ToT processor. Comparisons are made between the signal-to-noise ratio in the linear processor preceding the ToT circuit and that obtained at the output of the entire analog channel including the ToT function.