FATALIC: A Dedicated Front-End ASIC for the ATLAS TileCal Upgrade

A front-end ASIC (FATALIC) has been developed to fulfil the requirements of the Phase 2 upgrade of the ATLAS Tile Calorimeter. This electronics performs the complete processing of the signal delivered by each PM tube. The first stage is a current conveyor which splits the 17-bit dynamic range of the input signal into three ranges. Each channel is followed by a shaper and a dedicated pipeline 12-bit ADC operating at 40MHz. The chip is developed using a 130nm CMOS technology. Measurements show a linearity better than 0.5% for low energy particles, and an ENC limited to 10 fC.