PANDA Website

The PANDA experiment is one of the main scientific pillars of the fu- ture Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research, currently under construc- tion in Darmstadt, Germany. It will investigate hadron physics measur- ing antipron-proton annihilation reactions. The antiproton beam with mo- menta between 1 . 5 GeV / c to 15 GeV / c , will allow to explore a broad physics program including hyperon, open-charm and exotic hadronic states. The Micro Vertex Detector (MVD) is the innermost sub-detector of the tracking system of the PANDA experiment. It is based on silicon sensors with pixel and micro strip segmentation and its main task is the precise spatial identification and measurement of primary and secondary decay vertices. This thesis describes the key features of the PANDA Strip ASIC (PASTA), a full-custom chip developed to read out the double-sided micro strip sen- sors of the MVD. PASTA aims at highly resolved time-stamping and charge information gathering through a time-digital approach. A Time to Digital Converter (TDC), allowing a time bin width down to 50 ps , measures the Time over Threshold (ToT) of the sensor signals processed by a application specific, newly developed front-end amplifier. In particular, this thesis re- ports the theoretical studies yielding to the final implementation showing the performance of the front-end stage evaluated with professional simula- tion tools.