Characterisation of the MUSIC ASIC for large-area silicon photomultipliers for gamma-ray astronomy

TL;DR

This paper characterizes the MUSIC ASIC designed for large-area silicon photomultipliers, demonstrating its suitability for gamma-ray astronomy applications by analyzing its response with Hamamatsu SiPMs.

Contribution

It introduces and evaluates the MUSIC ASIC as an effective front-end solution for large-area SiPMs in gamma-ray telescopes, highlighting its pole-zero cancellation and active summation features.

Findings

MUSIC ASIC effectively handles long SiPM signals with pole-zero cancellation.

Coupling MUSIC with Low Cross Talk SiPMs improves gamma-ray camera performance.

The ASIC reduces power consumption compared to discrete electronics.

Abstract

Large-area silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) are desired in many applications where large surfaces have to be covered. For instance, a large area SiPM has been developed by Hamamatsu Photonics in collaboration with the University of Geneva, to equip gamma-ray cameras employed in imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes. Being the sensor about 1 cm$^2$, a suitable preamplification electronics has been investigated in this work, which can deal with long pulses induced by the large capacitance of the sensor. The so-called Multiple Use SiPM Integrated Circuit (MUSIC), developed by the ICCUB (University of Barcelona), is investigated as a potential front-end ASIC, suitable to cover large area photodetection planes of gamma-ray telescopes. The ASIC offers an interesting pole-zero cancellation (PZC) that allows dealing with long SiPM signals, the feature of active summation of up to 8 input channels into a single differential output and it can offer a solution for reducing power consumption compared to discrete solutions. Measurements and simulations of MUSIC coupled to two SiPMs developed by Hamamatsu are considered and the ASIC response is characterized. The 5$^{th}$ generation sensor of the Low Cross Talk technology coupled to MUSIC turns out to be a good solution for gamma-ray cameras.