Readout and timing system prototypes for DETNI

Within the DETNI project prototypes of three novel position sensitive thermal neutron detectors types and adequate readout electronics have been developed. The detectors are based on thin solid neutron converters together with two-dimensional readout structures for the detection of secondary particles induced by the neutron capture. They aim at global count rates of up to 100 MHz together with a high spatial and time resolution. In order to utilize these detector characteristics new frontend and data acquisition electronics was required. A novel channel-wise self-triggered ASIC has been developed, which is able to cope with such high count rates and which complies with the signal specifications of the three different detector types. It provides time and analog information of a neutron event with a time resolution of 2 ns. For the data acquisition electronics, which will be described in this paper, prototypes of a clock distribution system and of a FPGA based readout system have been developed with current state-of-the-art electronics. The clock distribution system is to provide high precision, high frequency clock signals to the frontend, which is required to achieve the desired time resolution. The FPGA based readout system is to read out time stamp and analog information of the ASICs, carry out the digitization and transmit the data stream to a host PC