Petiroc, a new front-end ASIC for time of flight application

Petiroc is a 16-channel front-end ASIC designed to readout silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) for particle time-of-flight measurement applications. Petiroc combines a very fast and low-jitter trigger with an accurate charge measurement. The concept of the ASIC is to combine two measurement lines that won´t interfere one with another to measure both first incident photon timing measurement and whole crystal light charge integration. An adjustment of the SiPM high voltage is possible using a channel-by-channel input DAC. That allows a fine SiPM gain and dark noise adjustment at the system level to correct for the non-uniformity of SiPMs. The power consumption is 3.5 mW/channel, excluding ASIC outing buffer. First measurement on Petiroc shows a time jitter down to 16ps on 20 photoelectrons test pulses and 46ps with 15 photoelectrons from a Hamamatsu MPPC. Charge measurement has been measured and 1% linearity has been measured up to 2000 photoelectrons. Energy resolution has been measured at 9.5% FWMH. The main application of Petiroc is PET time-of-flight prototyping but can be used for any application that requires both sharp time resolution and precise energy measurement.