COTS Analog Prototype for LHCb's Calorimeter Upgrade

The objective of this thesis is to present a proposal for the analogue signal processing chain needed for the LHCb calorimeter upgrade improving the design used originally. The design contains several novelties: the system was designed with low noise in mind from the beginning, it is made to have good immunity to interferences stressing the fact that the board will be shared with large digital circuits, differential operational amplifiers are used in a non-standard way as a mean to obtain opposite polarity signals for the signal treatment and a way to increase the available signal in the front end electronics is proposed. The thesis starts with a brief introduction to the detector and its environment. This is followed by an explanation of the use of shapers in high energy physics detectors and the constraints that the shaper must address in the LHCb calorimeter. This leads to a chapter where the circuit design is explained starting from the analysis of the original circuit and its flaws. Once the original circuit and the restrictions are understood the different parts of the circuit are explained showing the key points of each one. The explanation always starts as theoretic calculations, followed by practical problems and its solution until a fine tuning is obtained. Once the functional circuit is designed a chapter of electromagnetic considerations explains all the measures taken during the PCB design to prevent noise from leaking into the system.