Application of the DRS4 Chip for GHz Waveform Digitizing Circuit

TL;DR

This paper presents a high-speed, low-cost waveform digitizing circuit based on the DRS4 chip, achieving GHz sampling rates, high resolution, and low noise, suitable for physics experiments and other applications.

Contribution

The development of a multi-channel, GHz-rate waveform digitizer using the DRS4 chip with superior linearity, low noise, and compact design, differing from traditional ADC or TDC based systems.

Findings

Sampling rate up to 5 GSPS achieved

Linearity better than 0.1%

Time resolution around 50 ps

Abstract

At present, fast waveform digitizing circuit is more and more employed in modern physics experiments for processing the signals from an array detector. A new fast waveform sampling digitizing circuit developed by us is presented in this paper. Different with the traditional waveform digitizing circuit constructed with analog to digital converter(ADC) or time to digital converter(TDC), it is developed based on domino ring sampler(DRS), a switched capacitor array(SCA) chip. A DRS4 chip is used as a core device in our circuit, which has a fast sampling rate up to five gigabit samples per second (GSPS). The circuit has advantages of high resolution, low cost, low power dissipation, high channel density and small size. The quite satisfactory results are acquired by the preliminary performance test of this circuit board. Eight channels can be provided by one board, which has a 1-volt input dynamic range for each channel. The circuit linearity is better than 0.1%, the noise is less than 0.5 mV (root mean square, RMS), and its time resolution is about 50ps. The several boards can be cascaded to construct a multi-board system. The good performances make the circuit board to be used not only for physics experiments, but also for other applications.