Front-End electronics development for the new Resistive Plate Chamber detector of HADES

In this paper we present the new RPC wall, which is being installed in the HADES detector at Darmstadt GSI. It consists of time-of-flight (TOF) detectors used for both particle identification and triggering. Resistive Plate Chamber (RPC) detectors are becoming widely used because of their excellent TOF capabilities and reduced cost. The wall will contain 1024 RPC modules, covering an active area of around 7 m(2), replacing the old TOFino detector at the low polar angle region. The excellent TOF and good charge resolutions of the new detector will improve the time resolution to values better than 100 ps. The Front-End electronics for the readout of the RPC signals is implemented with two types of boards to satisfy the space constraints: the Daughterboards are small boards that amplify the low level signals from the detector and provide fast discriminators for time of flight measurements, as well as an integrator for charge measurements. The Motherboard provides stable DC voltages and a stable ground, threshold DACs for the discriminators, multiplicity trigger and impedance matched paths for transfer of time window signals that contain information about time and charge. These signals are sent to a custom TDC board that label each event and send data through Ethernet to be conveniently stored.