KLauS - A charge readout and fast discrimination readout ASIC for silicon photomultipliers

KLauS is an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for the readout of silicon photomultipliers (SiPM) developed in the 0.35 µm SiGe technology. It has been designed to provide a high precision charge measurement of the SiPM signal with a high dynamic range. In addition a fast signal discriminator has been implemented to provide trigger with a sub nanosecond jitter. The chip was specifically designed to satisfy the constraints of the analog hadronic calorimeter (AHCAL) developed by the CALICE collaboration for the next linear collider experiment. A low power consumption and the possibility to use power gating have been integrated in the chip in order to address the severe power constraints of this highly granular detector system. For a duty cycle of 1% an average power consumption of 25 µW per channel is achieved without affecting the readout capabilities of the chip. A mixed signal version with digital readout is planned for future versions of the ASIC.