# Prototype electronics for the silicon pad layers of the future Forward Calorimeter (FoCal) of the ALICE experiment at the LHC

## TL;DR

This paper details the development of electronics for silicon pad layers in the future ALICE FoCal, a high-granularity electromagnetic calorimeter designed for the LHC, including prototype instrumentation and system design.

## Contribution

It introduces the design and implementation of electronics for silicon pad sensors in the ALICE FoCal prototype, advancing detector instrumentation technology.

## Key findings

- Successful prototype instrumentation of silicon pad sensors
- Design proposal for full-detector readout system
- Enhanced capabilities for high-granularity calorimetry

## Abstract

A Forward Calorimeter (FoCal) has been proposed as part of the ALICE upgrades for data taking from 2029 onwards. The FoCal will feature a sampling electromagnetic calorimeter segmented into 110 towers supplemented by a hadron calorimeter. The electromagnetic calorimeter will be composed of 20 passive layers of tungsten absorber interleaved with 18 active layers of low-granularity silicon pad sensors and two layers of high-granularity pixel detectors. Each pad layer will be read out by 110 silicon pad sensors of 72 channels, amounting to a total of 1980 sensors. This paper describes, from front-end to back-end, the electronics developed to instrument a tower prototype composed of 18 silicon pad sensors as well as a design proposal for the full-detector readout system.