TH-PHD-2017-011

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.