FRONT-END ELECTRONICS FOR THE STAR TPC

The Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC (STAR) is a large acceptance detector n ow being built to study high energy heavy ion collisions. It detects c harged particles with a large time projection chamber. The 136,600 TPC pads are instrumented with waveform digitizers, implemented in custom low noise preamplifier/shaper and switched capacitor array/ADCs ICs. The system is highly integrated with all analog functions mounted on s mall cards that plug into the TPC. Detector mounted readout boards mul tiplex data from 1152 channels onto a 1.5 Gbit/sec fiber optic link to the data acquisition system.