PACIFIC: A 64-channel ASIC for scintillating fiber tracking in LHCb upgrade

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. Here we describe a detector made of scintillating fibers read out by silicon photomultipliers (SiPM), with a view to its application for this upgrade. This technology has been shown to achieve high efficiency and spatial resolution, but its integration within a LHCb experiment presents new challenges. This article gives an overview of the R&D; status of the low-Power ASIC for the sCIntillating FIbres traCker (PACIFIC) chip implemented in a 130 nm CMOS technology. The PACIFIC chip is a 64-channel ASIC which can be connected to a SiPM without the need of any external component. It includes analog signal processing and digitization. The first stage is a current conveyor followed by a tunable fast shaper (≈10 ns) and a gated integrator. The digitization is performed using a 3 threshold non-linear flash ADC operating at 40 MHz. The PACIFIC chip has the ability to cope with different SiPM suppliers with a power consumption below 8 mW per channel and it is radiation-tolerant. Lastly, simulation and test results show the proper read out of the SiPMs with the PACIFIC chip.