The trend in data acquisition systems for modern physics experiments is to digitize analog signals closer and closer to the detector. The digitization systems have followed the progress of commercial analog to digital converters. The state of the art for these devices is currently limited to 200Mega Sample/s for a 10 to 12 bits range. The new boards, described in this paper, have been designed to improve these performances by an order of magnitude. In its simplest version, this board includes mainly 4 channels of 12-bit resolution digitizers sampling analog data up to 2 GSample/s with an analog bandwidth of 300 MHz. It is based on the custom-designed MATACQ chip. Its innovative design allows to reach these performances with a power consumption smaller than 1W. The boards are triggerable either by internal or external signals and several boards are easily synchronizable. The board integrates both a GPIB and VME interfaces that permits a maximum readout speed of 500 event/s with all the memory depth of 4 channels read. |
