  A prototype of DIRC-like Time-of-Flight detector (DTOF), including a
pico-second time measurement electronics, is developed and tested
preliminarily. The basic structure of DTOF is composed of a fused silica
radiator connected to fast micro-channel plate PMTs (MCP-PMT), and readout by a
dedicated FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based front-end electronics. The
full electronics chain consists of a programmable differential amplifier, a
dual-threshold differential discriminator, and a timestamp Time-to-Digital
convertor. By splitting a MCP-PMT output signal into two identical electronics
chains, the coincidence time resolution (CTR) of pure electronics was measured
as 5.6 ps. By the beam test in H4 (150GeV/c, Muon) at CERN, the intrinsic CTR
of the whole detector prototype reaches 15.0 ps without using time-amplitude
correction. The test results demonstrate that the FPGA based front-end
electronics could achieve an excellent time performance for TOF detectors. It
is very compact, cost effective with a high multi-channel capacity and short
measurement dead time, which is very suitable for practical applications of
large-scale high performance TOF detectors in particle physics spectrometer.
