The Front-End electronics for the LHCb scintillating fibres detector

The LHCb detector will be upgraded during the next LHC shutdown in 2018/19 [ 1 ]. The tracker system will have a major overhaul. Its components will be replaced with new technologies in order to cope with the increased hit occupancy and radiation environment. A detector made of scintillating fibres read out by silicon photomultipliers (SiPM) is studied for this upgrade. Even if this technology has proven to achieve high efficiency and spatial resolution, its integration within a LHC experiment bears new challenges. This detector will consist of 12 planes of 5 to 6 layers of 250 m m fibres with an area of 5 6 m 2 . It leads to a total of 500k SiPM channels which need to be read out at 40 MHz. This article gives an overview of the R&D; status of the readout board and the PACIFIC chip. The readout board is connected to the SiPM on one side and to the experiment data-acquisition, experimental control system and services on the other side. The PACIFIC chip is a 128-channels ASIC which can be connected to one 128-channels SiPM without the need of any external component. It includes the analog signal processing and a 2 bits non-linear flash ADC for digitisation. The PACIFIC chip design features a very fast shaping ( 10 ns ) and the ability to cope with different SiPM suppliers with a power consumption below 8 mW per channel