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[EN] NEW is the first phase of NEXT-100 experiment, an experiment aimed at searching for neutrinoless double-beta decay. NEXT technology combines an excellent energy resolution with tracking capabilities thanks to a combination of optical sensors, PMTs for the energy measurement and SiPMs for topology reconstruction. Those two tools result in one of the highest background rejection potentials in the field. This work describes the tracking plane that will be constructed for the NEW detector which consists of close to 1800 sensors with a 1-cm pitch arranged in twenty- eight 64-SiPM boards. Then it focuses in the development of the electronics needed to read the 1800 channels with a front-end board that includes per-channel differential transimpedance input amplifier, gated integrator, automatic offset voltage compensation and 12-bit ADC. Finally, a de- scription of how the FPGA buffers data, carries out zero suppression and sends data to the DAQ interface using CERN RD-51 SRS s DTCC link specification complements the description of the electronics of the NEW detector tracking plane., The authors would like to acknowledge the collaboration of the membership of the NEXT experiment. The European Commision under the European Research Council 2013 Advanced Grant 339787 - NEXT, the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad of Spain under grants CONSOLIDER-Ingenio 2010 CSD2008-0037 (CUP), FPA2009-13697-C04-04 and FIS2012-37947-C04-04 (also co-financed by FEDER). The Director, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, of the US Department of Energy under contract no. DE-AC02-05CH11231; and the Portuguese FCT and FEDER through the program COMPETE, project PTDC/FIS/103860/2008.

[EN] Improving timing resolution in positron emission tomography (PET), thus having fine time information of the detected pulses, is important to increase the reconstructed images signal to noise ratio (SNR) [1]. In the present work, an integrated circuit topology for time extraction of the incoming pulses is evaluated. An accurate simulation including the detector physics and the electronics with different configurations has been developed. The selected architecture is intended for a PET system based on a continuous scintillation crystal attached to a SiPM array. The integrated circuit extracts the time stamp from the first few photons generated when the gamma-ray interacts with the scintillator, thus obtaining the best time resolution. To get the time stamp from the detected pulses, a time to digital converter (TDC) array based architecture has been proposed as in [2] or [3]. The TDC input stage uses a current comparator to transform the analog signal into a digital signal. Individually configurable trigger levels allow us to avoid false triggers due to signal noise. Using a TDC per SiPM configuration results in a very area consuming integrated circuit. One solution to this problem is to join several SiPM outputs to one TDC. This reduces the number of TDCs but, on the other hand, the first photons will be more difficult to be detected. For this reason, it is important to simulate how the time resolution is degraded when the number of TDCs is reduced. Following this criteria, the best configuration will be selected considering the trade-off between achievable time resolution and the cost per chip. A simulation is presented that uses Geant4 for simulation of the physics process and, for the electronic blocks, spice and Matlab. The Geant4 stage simulates the gamma-ray interaction with the scintillator, the photon shower generation and the first stages of the SiPM. The electronics simulation includes an electrical model of the SiPMarray and all the integrated circuitry that generates the time stamps. Time resolution results are analyzed using Matlab. The goal is to analyze the best resolution achievable with the SiPM and its degradation due to different circuitry configurations., This work was supported by local government Conselleria d’Educacio — Generalitat Valenciana research program GV/2011/068.

[EN] AMIC architecture has been introduced in previous works in order to provide a generic and expandable solution for implementing large number of outputs SiPM array/PMT detectors. The underlying idea in AMIC architecture is to calculate the moments of the detected light distribution in an analog fashion. These moments provide information about energy, x/y position, etc. of the light distribution of the detected event. Moreover this means that a small set of signals contains most of the information of the event, thus reducing the number of channels to be acquired. This paper introduces a new front-end device AMIC2GR which implements the AMIC architecture improving the features of the former integrated devices. Higher bandwidth and filtering coefficient precision along with a lower noise allow to apply some detector enhancements. Inhomogeneity among detector elements throughout the array can be reduced. Depth of interaction measurements can be obtained from the light distribution analysis. Also a common trigger signal can be obtained for the whole detector array. Finally AMIC2GR preamplifier stage close to SiPM output signals optimizes signal to noise ratio, which allows to reduce SiPM gain by using lower operating voltages thus reducing dark noise, This work was supported by Universitat Politecnica de Val ` encia ` through research program PAID06-10-2212.

In this article we introduce AMIC (Analog Moments Integrated Circuit), a novel analog Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) front-end for Positron Emission Tomography (PET) applications. Its working principle is based on mathematical analysis of light distribution through moments calculation. Each moment provides useful information about light distribution, such as energy, position, depth of interaction, skewness (deformation due to border effect) etc. A current buffer delivers a copy of each input current to several processing blocks. The current preamplifier is designed in order to achieve unconditional stability under high input capacitance, thus allowing the use of both Photo-Multiplier Tubes (PMT) and Silicon Photo-Multipliers (SiPM). Each processing block implements an analog current filtering by multiplying each input current by a programmable 8-bit coefficient. The latter is implemented through a high linear MOS current divider ladder, whose high sensitivity to variations in output voltages requires the integration of an extremely stable fully differential current collector. Output currents are then summed and sent to the output stage, that provides both a buffered output current and a linear rail-to-rail voltage for further digitalization. Since computation is purely additive, the 64 input channels of AMIC do not represent a limitation in the number of the detector's outputs. Current outputs of various AMIC structures can be combined as inputs of a final AMIC, thus providing a fully expandable structure. In this version of AMIC, 8 programmable blocks for moments calculation are integrated, as well as an I2C interface in order to program every coefficient. Extracted layout simulation results demonstrate that the information provided by moment calculation in AMIC helps to improve tridimensional positioning of the detected event. A two-detector test-bench is now being used for AMIC prototype characterization and preliminary results are presented. © 2011 IOP Publishing Ltd and SISSA.