Front-end electronics with fast signal shaper for silicon photomultipliers

The paper describes a CMOS Integrated Circuit designed for interfacing a Silicon Photomultiplier (SiPM) in UMC 180 nm technology. It features a full signal processing architecture containing Pole-Zero Cancellation (PZC) circuit, Peak Detector and Hold circuit and Comparators which one of main purposes is the coincidence recognition. Front-end electronics consists of two separate channels one for each SiPM. This along with comparators enables to introduce the coincidence mode to the system. It can be used e.g. for significant reduction of dark current of SiPM in measurement data. The main characteristic of the chip is its fast signal shaping. After the amplification and PZC correction, pulses corresponding to single particles of light detected by SiPM are 20 ns. Moreover, switching time of the comparators used in the circuit is 2 ns. Preliminary results of the chip measurements are presented and the functionality of the chip is also explained.