Using ultra fast analog memories for fast photodetector readout

The recent progresses in the field of photodetection have pushed the performances of the detectors toward the picosecond scale. Necessary precise charge and time measurement are mainly based on high-end oscilloscopes or commercial modules, but these solutions are expensive and house very few channels. B-WaveCatcher board provides high performances over a short time window. It houses two 12-bit 500-MHz-bandwidth digitizers sampling up to 3.2 GS/s. Its low consumption allows it to be USB-powered and it offers a lot of functionalities. The board has been used in different test benches dedicated to fast MCP-PMTs or SiPMs, and a reproducible time precision better than 10 ps rms has been demonstrated. Implementations with up to 16 channels have been designed and exhibit the same time precision. B-WaveCatcher thus seems to be a wonderful tool for photodetector characterization. Our next step is to widely expand the number of channels while keeping the 10 ps time precision.