Readout Electronics for the Belle II Silicon Vertex Detector

Full text: A major upgrade of the KEK-B factory (Tsukuba, Japan), aiming at a peak luminosity of 8 x 1035 / (cm2s), which is 40 times the present value, is foreseen until 2013. Consequently an upgrade of the Belle detector and in particular its Silicon Vertex Detector (SVD) is required. The new Belle II SVD will consist of four layers of double-sided silicon strip sensors at radii of 3.8, 8, 11.5 and 14 cm, completed by a double-layer pixel detector as the innermost sensing device. All DSSDs will be read out by the APV25 chip, which was originally developed for the CMS experiment. It has a peaking time of nominally 50ns, an integrated analog pipeline of 192 cells and has been proven to meet the requirements for Belle II in matters of occupancy and dead time. Since the KEK B-factory operates at relatively low energy, material budget inside the active volume has to be kept low to minimize multiple scattering. We will present the concept of the readout electronics of the future Belle II SVD. Its front-end uses the APV25 readout chip arranged according to the Origami chip-on-sensor concept to ensure both low material budget and lowest possible amplifier noise. The VME back-end system not only digitizes the analog signals, but also provides on-board data processing and sparsification. It further allows determining exact hit timing with a precision of a few nanoseconds by taking six consecutive samples of the APV shaper output signal. Thanks to this feature, hits from background particles can be identified and discarded, which finally leads to a significant occupancy reduction. Even though the development of the readout electronics is still ongoing, we have successfully tested its building blocks on prototypes in several beam tests and the lab. In 2009, the principal feasibility of the Origami concept has been shown by building a prototype module using a 4'' DSSD. Recently, new Belle II sensors (6'') were delivered, and we are now assembling an Origami module for this full size sensor. Later this year, we want to build a full ladder of the outermost layer, as this will be the most complicated object and by demonstrating its producibility we thus prove the concept of the whole Belle II SVD. Starting from the assembly steps of the 2009 prototype, we will further elaborate and refine the procedure, aiming at a mechanical precision in the order of few 10μm. (author)