The PHENIX detector is designed to perform a broad study of A-A, p-A, and p-p collisions to investigate nuclear matter under extreme conditions. A wide variety of probes, sensitive to all timescales, are used to study systematic variations with species and energy as well as to measure the spin structure of the nucleon. Designing for the needs of the heavy-ion and polarized-proton programs has produced a detector with unparalleled capabilities. PHENIX measures electron and muon pairs, photons, and hadrons with excellent energy and momentum resolution. The detector consists of a large number of subsystems that are discussed in other papers in this volume. The overall design parameters of the detector are presented. The PHENIX detector is designed to perform a broad study of A-A, p-A, and p-p collisions to investigate nuclear matter under extreme conditions. A wide variety of probes, sensitive to all timescales, are used to study systematic variations with species and energy as well as to measure the spin structure of the nucleon. Designing for the needs of the heavy-ion and polarized-proton programs has produced a detector with unparalleled capabilities. PHENIX measures electron and muon pairs, photons, and hadrons with excellent energy and momentum resolution. The detector consists of a large number of subsystems that are discussed in other papers in this volume. The overall design parameters of the detector are presented. Disciplines Engineering Physics | Physics Comments This is a manuscript of an article from Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research

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A custom mixed-signal CMOS integrated circuit has been developed for high performance positron emission tomography (PET) front-end applications. The application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) contains four differential variable-gain constant bandwidth amplifiers, which receive buffered photomultiplier tube (PMT) voltage pulses. All four amplified PMT signals are summed by adding their outputs and feeding this sum to the timing channel of the ASIC. The timing channel, which consists of a constant fraction discriminator and subnanosecond time to digital converter, offers excellent PET count rate performance and randoms noise reduction through low deadtime (100 ns) and excellent timing resolution (312.5 ps LSB). Amplified PMT signals are also distributed to energy processing channels for lowpass filtering and buffering for subsequent digitization by external ADCs. The ASIC offers substantial size, power, and cost reductions over existing PET front-end discrete designs. Fabricated in a 5 V, 0.5 m, triple metal, double poly, n-well CMOS process, the new ASIC has a die size of 20 mm 2 and dynamic power dissipation under 425 mW.Index Terms-CMOS integrated circuits, constant fraction discriminator (CFD), front-end electronics, nuclear pulse processing, positron emission tomography (PET), time to digital converter (TDC), variable gain amplifier (VGA).

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