Prototype of a silicon photomultiplier upgrade for the MAGIC telescopes camera

The MAGIC collaboration operates two 17 m diameter Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes on the Canary Island La Palma. Each of the two telescopes is currently equipped with 1039 photomultiplier tubes (PMTs). Due to the advances in the development of Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPMs), they are becoming a widely used alternative to PMTs in many research fields including Cherenkov astronomy. Within the Otto-Hahn group at the MPI for physics we are developing a SiPM based detector module for a possible upgrade of the MAGIC cameras and also for future experiments as, e.g., the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). SiPMs have a smaller detector size that the 1-inch diameter PMTs used in MAGIC and we, therefore, make use of a matrix of SiPMs to cover the same area. We optimized the light concentrator (Winston cone) for the angular acceptance of the SiPMs using ray tracing simulations and developed an analog summation circuit to sum up and amplify the SiPM signals. We will present the results of the simulations as well as a schematic structure of the detector and compare our SiPM module with the established PMT modules.