FastRICH: A Radiation-Tolerant Front-End ASIC for Precision Timing in the LHCb RICH Detector

by Gianmario Bergamin (CERN)

Tuesday 3 Nov 2026, 09:00 → 10:30 Europe/Zurich

13/2-005 (CERN)

This seminar will present FastRICH, a 16-channel, radiation-tolerant front-end ASIC developed for single-photon readout in the LHCb RICH detector upgrades for the High-Luminosity LHC. Designed in a 65 nm CMOS technology, the chip provides precise timestamping at 40 MHz with a timing resolution better than 30 ps rms, enabling suppression of out-of-time background and improved particle identification. FastRICH integrates a low-noise analogue front-end compatible with multi-anode photomultiplier tubes (MAPMTs), silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) and microchannel plate (MCP) sensors, followed by constant-fraction and leading-edge discriminators. An on-chip, PLL-based time-to-digital converter provides 24.4 ps time-of-arrival (ToA) and 390 ps time-over-threshold (ToT) binning. The digital architecture combines programmable time gating, zero suppression and adaptive packet formatting, transmitting data over up to four Aurora 64b/66b serial links at up to 1.28 Gb/s per link. The seminar will detail the circuit architecture, design strategy and key features of FastRICH, presenting the main design choices behind its analogue, timing and digital readout blocks. Results from single-ASIC characterization will be discussed, together with examples of its operation coupled to photosensors.