Readout Electronics and Data Acquisition for Gaseous Tracking Detectors

A complete, general solution for collecting and processing data from gaseous tracking detectors in high-rate applications has been developed. The readout chain consists of front-end modules equipped with PASTTREC ASIC chips and trigger readout boards version 3 (TRBv3) as a readout platform. The platform is accompanied by dedicated control, monitoring, and data quality assessment software. The entire system has been evaluated with a tracking system based on straw detectors in laboratory and in-beam experiments. In this paper, we present key elements of the system as well as results of various tests. The measured PASTTREC operation characteristics and the TRBv3 specification used for the readout allow us to adapt and to integrate it to the existing HADES spectrometer and the PANDA detector, an experiment under construction, both located at the FAIR facility in Darmstadt.