  Future experiments of nuclear and particle physics are moving towards the
high luminosity regime, in order to access suppressed processes like rare B
decays or exotic charmonium resonances. In this scenario, high rate capability
is a key requirement for electronics instrumentation, together with excellent
timing resolution for precise event reconstruction. The development of
dedicated FrontEnd Electronics (FEE) for detectors has become increasingly
challenging. A current trend in R&D is towards multipurpose FEE which can be
easily adapted to a great variety of detectors, without impairing the required
high performance. We report on high-precision timing solutions which utilise
high-bandwidth preamplifiers and fast discriminators providing
Time-over-Threshold information, which can be used for charge measurements or
walk corrections thus improving the obtainable timing resolution. The output
signal are LVDS and can be directly fed into a multi-hit TDC readout. The
performance of the electronics was investigated for single photon signals,
typical for imaging Cherenkov detectors. The opposite condition of light
signals arising from plastic scintillators, was also studied. High counting
rates per channel of several MHz were achieved, and a timing resolution of
better than 100 ps could be obtained in a test experiment using the full
readout chain.

Instrumentation and Detectors