Design and performances of fast front-end electronics for COMPASS MWPCs

In the COMPASS experiment, under construction at CERN, about 23000 channels of MWPCs will be used. The very high rate of the muon and hadron beams, and the consequently high trigger rate, require front-end electronics with a new conceptual design. A new MWPC front-end electronics that fulfills the main COMPASS requirement to have a fast DAQ with a minimum dead-time has been designed and tested. The scheme of the new, very low dead-time front-end electronics will be described; the results of the detector commissioning of the summer 2000 run, using a reduced set-up equipped with the running electronics will be described. Installation of the COMPASS detectors is to start in the spring of 2001, and production running is foreseen for the summer of 2001.