Front-End Electronics for the KAOS Spectrometer at MAMI

A new front-end electronics system has been developed for the electron arm tracking detectors in the Kaos spectrometer at the Mainz microtron MAMI. The signals of multi-anode photomultipliers are collected by 96-channel front-end boards, digitized by double-threshold discriminators and the signal time is picked up by F1 TDC chips. The system was designed to process more than 4,000 channels and to cope with the high electron flux in the spectrometer and the high count rate requirement of the detectors. A subset of 288 channels was installed and successfully used in the 2008 data taking period of the Kaos spectrometer.