Very high dynamic range and high sampling rate VME digitizing boards for physics experiments

The trend in data acquisition systems for modern physics experiments is to digitize analog signals closer and closer to the detector. The digitization systems have followed the progress of commercial analog to digital converters. The state of the art for these devices is currently 225 MSample/s for a 10 to 12 bit range. The new boards, described in this paper, have been designed to improve these performances by an order of magnitude. In its simplest version, this board mainly includes 4 channels sampling analog data up to 2 GSample/s with an analog bandwidth of 300 MHz, and digitizing it with a 12-bit dynamic range. It is based on the custom-designed MATACQ chip. The latter's innovative design permits reaching these performances with power consumption smaller than 1 W. The boards are triggerable either by internal or external signals and several boards are easily synchronizable. The board integrates both GPIB and VME interfaces that permit a maximum readout speed of 500 events/s with the whole memory depth of the 4 channels read.