A LARGE-SCALE DIGITIZER SYSTEM (LSD) FOR CHARGE AND TIME DIGITIZATION IN HIGH-ENERGY PHYSICS EXPERIMENTS
R. Althaus, Kirsten, F. A., Lee, K. L., Olson, S. R., Wagner, L. J., Wolverton, J. M. · University of North Texas Digital Library (University of North Texas) · 1976
A large-scale digitizer (LSD) system for acquiring charge and time-of-arrival particle data from high-energy-physics experiments has been developed at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. The objective in this development was to significantly reduce the cost of instrumenting large-detector arrays which, for the 4..pi..-geometry of colliding-beam experiments, are proposed with an order of magnitude increase in channel count over previous detectors. In order to achieve the desired economy (approximately $65 per channel), a system was designed in which a number of control signals for conversion, for digitization, and for readout are shared in common by all the channels in each 128-channel bin. The overall-system concept and the distribution of control signals that are critical to the 10-bit charge resolution and to the 12-bit time resolution are described. Also described is the bit-serial transfer scheme, chosen for its low component and cabling costs.