Proposal, development and test of an analog front-end electronic board for the Nemo telescope

The NEMO collaboration is involved in the R&D of the main technologies for the project of a km3 scale underwater neutrino telescope. The proposed detector is made up of thousands of Optical Modules (hereafter OM), spread over the entire volume for Cˇ erenkov light detection. Each OMis equipped with a photo multiplier tube (PMT) and an electronic circuit for data acquisition and transmission (DAQ-Board). This work points out the possible benefits of a hybrid solution based on an analog ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) employed for the analog signal acquisition and an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array), a digital programmable IC (Integrated Circuit) which performs the data acquisition and the data transmission.