The OPAL silicon-tungsten calorimeter front end electronics

A pair of small angle silicon-tungsten (Si-W) calorimeters has been built to measure the luminosity to a precision better than 0.1% in the OPAL experiment at the Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider at CERN near Geneva. Each calorimeter contains 19 layers of tungsten (W) plates and silicon (Si) detectors, corresponding to a total of 22 radiation lengths, sampled by about 1 m/sup 2/ of detectors divided into 304/spl times/64 independently read out channels. A complete electronics system has been developed, from the preamplifier up to the VME read out and control interface. It includes a fast trigger based on analogue sums. This paper describes how a large number of channels have been implemented in a dense environment, thanks to the use of ASIC's directly bonded on the detector.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>