BaBar DIRC electronics front-end chain

The Front-End electronics of the Detector of Internally Reflected Cerenkov light (DIRC) for the BaBar experiment is presented. Its aim is to measure to better than 1 ns the arrival time of Cerenkov photoelectrons, detected in a 11000 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 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.