ASD IC for the thin gap chambers in the LHC ATLAS Experiment

An amplifier-shaper-discriminator (ASD) chip was designed and built for Thin Gap Chambers in the forward muon trigger system of the LHC Atlas experiment. The ASD IC uses SONY Analog Master Slice bipolar technology. The IC contains 4 channels in a QFP48 package. The gain of its first stage (preamplifier) is approximately 0.8 V/pC and output from the preamplifier is received by a shaper (main-amplifier) with a gain of 7. The baseline restoration circuit is incorporated in the main-amplifier. The threshold voltage for discriminator section is common to the 4 channels and their digital output level is LVDS- compatible. The IC also has analog output of the preamplifier. The equivalent noise charge at input capacitance of 150 pF is around 7500 electrons. The power dissipation with LDVS outputs (100 Omega load) is 59 mW/ch.