Future discoveries at the cosmic, energy and intensity frontiers require large arrays of inexpensive, high-performance instrumentation.  The electronics of such systems now routinely consist of billions of transistors taking measurements at Giga-Hertz frequencies and transmitting data at Giga-bit/second rates.  Affordable access to these technologies has fuelled this new “Giga” Era, which forms the backbone of recent and future discovery experiments.

While the complexity of these devices can seem intimidating, they obey simple physical principles.  Understanding how they work and can be used is an increasingly important skill that every experimental scientist should possess.

After an introduction to the history and basic operating principles of these devices, a concrete example of the readout system for the Belle II Time-Of-Propagation detector will be provided.