Design and Development of STRAWZ: Streaming Autonomous Waveform-digitizer with Zero-suppression

Next generation nuclear physics detectors will require data acquisition with extremely good timing resolutions (10 ps or better), high sampling rates (5Gsa/s) and very high channel counts. To simplify data handling and reduce the needs for complicated and long latency triggering feedback, a streaming mechanism would be preferred. However, the potentially very large data amount requires zero suppression as close as possible to the source. To address this problem, Nalu Scientific proposes to design a novel multi-channel (up to 64) waveform digitizer chip with the aforementioned performance and the capability of performing self-triggering via elaboration of local and neighboring triggering information, as well as drastic zero suppression at the source to enable a streaming architecture. Data reduction will be achieved by employing locally generated trigger information to isolate and target relevant signals for digitization, as well as applying flexible signal processing and feature extraction techniques to further compress the information to be transmitted downstream. During phase I, the project will concentrate on establishing concept feasibility and permit initial evaluation. This will be initially achieved by studying the architecture of the new chip and its implementation constraints vis-a-vis the chosen technology. Furthermore, all the analog and digital parts of the asic will be designed, simulated and integrated into a prototype design with a small number of channels ready for manufacture to validate the concept. A full multi-channel chip model will also be developed and simulated. It is expected that the very high timing precision, high sampling rate, large channel density and programmable feature extraction capabilities will allow its integration in state-of-the-art acquisition schemes for future generation detectors, lowering costs while increasing the discovery potential of US NP and HEP experiments. It is also expected that the devices will find application outside the physics community such as general-purpose instrumentations and medical/PET imaging, possibly bundled with sensing devices (photomultipliers). We anticipate being able to sell the device as an OEM manufacturer, provide associated design services or license it to a larger device manufacturer due to the low cost and low power nature of the design which will give us a competitive edge.