Development of a Front End Board for a Plastic Scintillation Detector

A new plastic scintillation detector was constructed to improve the measurement of the neutrino energy spectrum in the energy region around 1 GeV. The detector has plastic scintillator strips and fibers. Each strip is read out by using a wavelength shifting fiber attached to a 64-channel multi-anode photomultiplier (MAPMT). The readout system consists of front-end electronics attached to a MAPMT and a back-end versa module eurocard (VME) module. A combination of application specific integrated circuit (ASICs) is used for the front-end readout electronics. VA32HDR11 (VA) is a 32-ch preamplifier chip with a shaper and a multiplexer. TA32CG (TA) provides timing information after taking OR of 32 channels. Two packages of VA/TA are mounted on a custom-designed front-end board (FEB) in order to read out signals from 64 anodes. A total of 300 FEBs were designed and manufactured in Korea, after which quality control was performed. For the purpose of quality control, visual inspections, bias voltage checks, tests in the pulse mode, and tests with charge injection were carried out. All of the test results were transferred to a database on the Web. All FEBs were installed at the experiment site and are functioning well. This paper describes the details of the FEB development.