RPC performance with HARDROC based readout

The proposed 51 kton magnetized Iron Calorimeter (ICAL) detector at India based Neutrino Observatory (INO) aims to investigate atmospheric neutrino oscillations. ICAL will use approximately 29000 glass-based Resistive Plate Chambers (RPCs) as active detector elements, that require millions of electronic channels to be read. Therefore, a multi-channel readout Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) named as HARDROC can be considered as a possible option. The ASIC is a 64 channel analog-digital front-end chip that can read negative fast and short input signals. Each of the HARDROC channels features a current sensitive pre-amplifier coupled to the triple-branch shaper stage and then 3 low offset discriminators. A comparative performance study of the RPC detector with HARDROC ASIC and with custom electronics, based on CAEN modules and HMC pre-amplifiers, was conducted. Measurements were made on a 30cm $\times$ 30cm glass RPC detector using the cosmic rays. The purpose of this work was to compare detector performance in terms of their strip detective efficiency and count rate.