The building blocks for the upgrade of the LHCb RICH detectors

The RICH detectors of the LHCb experiment at CERN will undergo a major upgrade in the next years. A key element of the LHCb upgrade programme is to increase the readout rate of the whole detector from the current value of 1 MHz to 40 MHz. The photon detectors will be replaced with multi-anode photomultiplier tubes, read out with a new custom front-end ASIC, the CLARO8, tailored for high rate single photon counting. The layout of the system was designed to minimise parasitic capacitance at the anodes, resulting in very low noise and low crosstalk.