Low-Noise, Low-Power Pulse Shaper for Particle Detection (Invited Paper)

Pulse shapers are widely used in particle detector applications to reduce the rise and fall times of the pulse signal and to remove noise from the frontend amplifiers. We demonstrate a low-noise, low-power pulse shaper employing an active lowpass Salley-Key biquad filter, passive highpass filter, and input/output buffers. The design process is described to generate the desired transfer characteristic while incorporating tuning knobs to adapt the shaper characteristic to the needs of different applications. Utilizing only a single 1.8-V supply, the shaper consumes 1.5 mW and achieves an input-referred noise of 17 μV
_rms
, both the lowest among state-of-the-art. The power efficiency normalized to bandwidth and noise is nearly 1.7× better than the next best design.