The DIRC front-end electronics chain for BaBar

Recent results from the front-end electronics of the Detector of Internally Reflected Cerenkov light (DIRC) for the BaBar experiment at SLAC (Stanford, USA) are presented. It measures to better than 1 ns the arrival time of Cerenkov photoelectrons, detected in a 11,000 phototubes array and their amplitude spectra. It mainly comprises 64-channel DIRC front-end boards (DFB) equipped with eight full-custom analog chips performing zero-cross discrimination with 2 mV threshold and pulse shaping, four full-custom digital TDC chips for timing measurements with 500 ps binning and a readout logic selecting hits in the trigger window, and DIRC crate controller cards (DCC) serializing the data collected from up to 16 DFBs onto a 1.2 Gb/s optical link. Extensive test results of the pre-production chips are presented, as well as system tests.