CHICSi—a compact ultra-high vacuum compatible detector system for nuclear reaction experiments at storage rings. III. readout system

(CHICSi) Celsius Heavy Ion Collaboration Si detector system is a high granularity, modular detector telescope array for operation around the cluster-jet target/circulating beam intersection of the CELSIUS storage ring at the The. Svedberg Laboratory in Uppsala, Sweden. It is able to provide identity and momentum vector of up to 100 charged particles and fragments from proton–nucleus and nucleus–nucleus collisions at intermediate energies, 50–1000A MeV. All detector telescopes as well as the major part of electronic readout system are placed inside the target chamber in ultra-high vacuum (UHV, 10−9–10−7 Pa). This requires Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) microchip for the spectroscopic signal processing and the generation and transport of digital control signals. Eighteen telescopes, read out with chip-on-board technique by ceramics Mother Boards (MB) and corresponding 18 microchips are mounted on a 450×45 mm2 Grand Mother Board (GMB), processed on FR4 glass-fibre material. Each of these 28 GMB units contains a daisy-chain organisation of the VLSI chips and associated protection circuits. Analogue-to-digital conversion of the spectroscopic signals is performed on a board outside the chamber which is connected on one side to a power distribution board, directly attached to a UHV mounting flange, and on the other side to the VME-based data acquisition system (CHICSiDAQ). This in its turn is connected via a fibre-optic link to the general TSL acquisition system (SVEDAQ), and in this way data from auxiliary detector systems, read out in CAMAC mode, can be stored in coincidence with CHICSi data.