New readout electronics for ATLAS ZDC detector

The ATLAS ZDC detectors located in the LHC tunnel detect far-forward neutrons emerging from interactions during proton-proton or lead-lead collisions. PMT signals are transferred over the 200 m long fast air-core cable to the electronics room. A new ZDC-LUCROD readout module is a 9U VME board capable of processing signals from 8 channels with the FADC sampling rate of 320 MHz. The primary modification w.r.t. the LUCID-LUCROD is the full integration with the ATLAS TDAQ and digital triggering based on the pipelined calculation of the signal second derivative with further processing using a programmable set of thresholds.