Performances of an upgraded front-end-board for the NectarCAM camera

TL;DR

This paper evaluates an upgraded Front-End Board for NectarCAM, featuring an improved NECTAr chip that enhances sampling speed and reduces deadtime, with laboratory tests confirming its superior performance.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new FEB version with an advanced NECTAr chip, significantly improving timing, deadtime, and overall performance for the NectarCAM camera.

Findings

Reduced deadtime by an order of magnitude

Improved timing and linearity performance

Validated laboratory performance metrics

Abstract

The Front-End Board (FEB) is a key component of the NectarCAM camera, which has been developed for the Medium-Sized-Telescopes (MST) of the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO). The FEB is responsible for reading and converting the signals from the camera's photo-multiplier tubes (PMTs) into digital data, as well as generating module level trigger signals. This contribution provides an overview of the design and performances of a new version of the FEB that utilizes an improved version of the NECTAr chip. The NECTAr chip includes a switched capacitor array for sampling signals at 1 GHz, and a 12-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC) for digitizing each sample when the trigger signal is received. The integration of this advanced NECTAr chip significantly reduces the deadtime of NectarCAM by an order of magnitude as compared to the previous version. This contribution also presents the results of laboratory testing of the new FEB, including measurements of timing performance, linearity, dynamic range, and deadtime.