A fast voltage preamplifier for use with MWPCs

We report the development of a voltage preamplifier for use with ionizing particles detection. It has been designed to match the requirements of a test station for muon Multiwire Proportional Chambers (MWPC) of the LHCb experiment at CERN. Simulation results and bench test measurements are presented, which exhibit the main circuit features: gain close to 500, rise time below 20 ns, bandwidth exceeding 30 MHz, input noise lower than 10 nV / Hz . Other results that demonstrate the applicability of the device in other contexts, specially with X-Ray imaging systems based on position sensitive detectors and proportional counters, are presented.