A low power front-end prototype for silicon pixel detectors with 100ps time resolution

A time-accurate front-end prototype for silicon pixel particle detectors is presented. The circuit has been designed to meet the requirements of the NA62's beam spectrometer, the Gigatracker. It consists of a charge-sensitive preamplifier (CSP) and a fully integrated constant-fraction discriminator (CFD), showing less than 80ps jitter (rms) for one MIP signal and less than 250ps peak-to-peak time-walk for 0.5 to 5 MIP signal range. The overall time resolution is 100ps rms, accounting for the Landau distribution of the detector signal, while the total power consumption is 600 uW. The circuit was implemented in a 0.13 um CMOS commercial process, occupying 280μm × 80μm of silicon space.