The new ATLAS/LUCID detector

The new ATLAS luminosity monitor has many innovative aspects implemented. Its photomultipliers tubes are used as detector elements by using the Cherenkov light produced by charged particles above threshold crossing the quartz windows. The analog shaping of the readout chain has been improved, in order to cope with the 25 ns bunch spacing of the LHC machine. The main readout card is a quite general processing unit based on 12 bit -320 MS/s Flash ADC and on FPGAs, delivering the processed data to 1.3 Gb/s optical links. The article will describe all these aspects and will outline future perspectives of the card for next generation high energy physics experiments.