Front end electronics for an LHC straw transition radiation detector

A readout system has been designed and built to match the particular requirements of straw detectors used for particle tracking and particle identification by use of the transition radiation technique. A bipolar analogue integrated circuit with very high rate capability and two thresholds to separate track signals from transition radiation photon signals forms the front end of a complete readout system which is briefly described. The front end circuit passes discriminated digital data to the rest of the system via a novel three level logic scheme. The design of the circuit and expected performance are presented and compared with results from an earlier prototype