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

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. The sensor being about 1 cm2, 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.

Automated summary

Large-area silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) are being developed for various applications, such as gamma-ray cameras in atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes. In this work, an investigation was conducted on a preamplification electronics, specifically the Multiple Use SiPM Integrated Circuit (MUSIC), developed by the University of Barcelona, which can handle the long pulses generated by the large capacitance of the SiPM sensor. The MUSIC ASIC offers features like active summation of multiple input channels, pole-zero cancellation (PZC), and reduced power consumption compared to discrete solutions.