The Shower Maximum Front-End Electronics for the CDF upgrade

The CDF Shower Maximum Electronics is part of the upgraded data acquisition system for the CDF experiment at Fermilab. The system services five detector subsystems of the calorimeter, and accommodates the different properties and data processing requirements imposed by each of them. The electronics is built around a custom integrated circuit called the SMQIE, which produces floating-point data with no dead-time using a 7.6-MHz clock. The components of the system are described, along with the principles of operation for performing data acquisition, calibration, and diagnostics.