A Charge Sensitive Amplifier for time and energy measurements

Silicon detectors are applied to measure precisely the energy loss of penetrating particles. The classical front end electronics for accurate energy measurements is a Charge-Sensitive-Amplifier (CSA). Modern data acquisition systems, which use time stamps to synchronize events, require in addition good timing properties of the sensors. In this paper we present a newly developed Time-CSA (TCSA), which combines excellent energy resolution with a very good time performance, ideally suited to process fast signals from, e.g., Diamond or Avalanche-Photo-Diode (APD) detectors. Our design uses discrete commercial elements only.