MICA - A MULTICHANNEL INTEGRATED CHARGE AMPLIFIER FOR THE READ-OUT OF MULTIELECTRODE DETECTORS

A 16 channel, fully parallel, CMOS integrated circuit including a preamplifier, a shaper and a discriminator, has been designed and succesfully tested in the laboratory and on the detector. It combines fast shaping (28 ns peaking time) with good noise performance (600 + 18/pF electrons ENC). The shaper can be tailored for both delta and tail currents with positive or negative polarity. The discriminator has an ECL compatible output with a threshold sensitivity of +/- 5000 electrons. It seems well suited for the read-out of 1-D and 2-D microstrip gas chambers as well as for silicon microstrip detectors or other multielectrode detectors with parallel digital read-out and moderate sampling pitch.