The future PANDA-Experiment at the FAIR accelerator facility in Darmstadt/Germany utilizes an antiproton beam with momenta of 1.5 - 15 GeV/\boldmath$c$\unboldmath~incident on a hydrogen or heavy element fixed target. It addresses open questions concerning the strong interaction with one focus on high precision charmonium spectroscopy. The spatial and timing resolution in detecting fast-decaying particles e.g. in open-charm channels is crucial and requires the application of thin solid state detectors coupled with a fast untriggered readout electronics. The contribution will focus on the silicon microstrip tracker of the innermost subdetector, the Micro Vertex Detector (MVD), which is composed of double-sided silicon strip detectors (DSSDs). These are connected to ultra-thin flex modules carrying novel fast self-triggering front-end ASICs named PASTA. The construction of the DSSD modules, the carrier PCB and the architecture of the PASTA chip will be discussed as well as methods to qualify the sensors. An overview of the prototypes developed and tested up to now is given together with the future steps to be taken in order to arrive at the mass production of the full-scale modules.

The future international accelerator facility FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research) will host multiple experiments. A focus will be on experiments with antiprotons. The PANDA (antiProton ANnihilation at DArmstadt) experiment will study the strong interaction in annihilation reactions between an antiproton beam and a stationary gas jet target. The PANDA detector consists of different sub-detectors for tracking, particle identification and calorimetry. The Micro-Vertex Detector (MVD) as the innermost part of the tracking system will facilitate precise tracking and detection of secondary vertices. The MVD will comprise hybrid silicon pixel sensors and double-sided silicon strip sensors. The strip part will contain approximately 200,000 channels that need to be read out using a highly integrated front-end chip. Therefore, a custom-made ASIC is being developed. The self-triggering PASTA chip (PAnda STrip Asic) will employ the Time-over-Threshold (ToT) technique to digitize the hit amplitude and utilize time-to-digital converters (TDC) with analog interpolators to provide a high-precision time stamp of the hit. A custom-made Module Data Concentrator ASIC (MDC) will multiplex the data of all front-ends of one double-sided strip sensor towards the CERN-developed GBT chip set (GigaBit Transceiver). The MicroTCA-based MVD Multiplexer Board (MMB) at the off-detector site will receive and concentrate the data from the GBT links and transfer it to FPGA-based compute nodes for global event building that combines all sub-detectors.

This paper appears in: IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science Issue Date: DECEMBER.2014 Volume: 61 Issue: 6 On page(s): 1 Print ISSN: 0018-9499 Online ISSN: 1558-1578 Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/TNS.2014.2363297