A Prototype of the Timing Electronic System for the CALICE SDHCAL

The upgrade of the calorimeter for linear collider experiment (CALICE) semidigital hadronic calorimeter (SDHCAL) to Timing-SDHCAL aims to leverage high-resolution time information by replacing the active layers made of glass resistive plate chamber (GRPC) detectors with multigap resistive plate chamber (MRPC) ones. This enhancement allows for the identification of neutral and charged particles and the separation of close-by showers. Consequently, a new electronic system is required to read out the MRPC signals. In this article, we present a prototype of timing electronics based on the Petiroc2B application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), along with a data acquisition (DAQ) system built on the Zynq UltraScale+ system-on-chip (SoC). The system demonstrates a satisfactory single-shot time resolution of 41.9 ps. In addition, the prototype has been tested with MRPC to detect cosmic rays. This prototype provides a feasible approach to constructing high-resolution timing electronic systems for MRPC and serves as a preparatory step for the Timing-SDHCAL.