A TDC chip for the LHCb Outer Tracker

For the LHCb experiment at the CERN LHC storage ring, which will start operation in 2005, major parts of the electronics reading out the Outer Tracker are developed at University of Heidelberg.

The Outer Tracker is a large Straw Tube system build at NIKHEF in Amsterdam, the Physics Institute of Heidelberg University, Krakau University and Beijing University.

The drift time of the straw tube is measured by a TDC called OTIS, which is currently under development at the ASIC lab. Since OTIS is will be mounted directly inside the detector, the chip is implemented in a radiation hard technology.

OTIS is a 32 channel TDC with an intrinsic resolution of better than 1ns. Hits and drift times are stored into a clock driven pipeline of 160 stages running at 40MHz. Up to 16 events can be marked to be read out concurrently to data recording. This is required to comply with the LHCb Read-out architecture.

The chip has a parallel port that can interface directly to a radiation hard high speed serializer chip GOL, developed at CERN.

Further information is available on the project's home page.