Low power electronics for NEMO detector

For the realization of the submarine detector NEMO it is necessary to design an acquisition system which is able to capture the signals coming from photo-multipliers (PMs) of the optical modules (OMs) and to satisfy several specifications: low power consumption; few submarine interconnections for reliability and simplicity of the deployment; flexibility of the system; minimum dead time; high dynamic range; accuracy in order to have good resolution. Here we present a Very Large Scale Integration full-custom solution for the OMs according to the requirements. It foresees to use a switched capacitor analog memory, a trigger and single photon classification system, a PLL and a control unit able to manage the different operation states of the whole system. For such a system we foresee a power dissipation not higher than 200-300 mV in each OM, 20 bit dynamic range and a dead time of about 0.1%.