  The barrel time-of-flight detector for the PANDA experiment at FAIR is
foreseen as a Scintillator Tile (SciTil) Hodoscope based on several thousand
small plastic scintillator tiles read-out with directly attached Silicon
Photomultipliers (SiPMs). The main tasks of the system are an accurate
determination of the time origin of particle tracks to avoid event mixing at
high collission rates, relative time-of-flight measurements as well as particle
identification in the low momentum regime. The main requirements are the use of
a minimum material amount and a time resolution of $\sigma < 100\,\mathrm{ps}$.
We have performed extensive optimization studies and prototype tests to prove
the feasibility of the SciTil design and finalize the R&D phase. In a 2.7 GeV/c
proton beam at Forschungszentrum J\"ulich a time resolution of about 80 ps has
been achieved using SiPMs from KETEK and Hamamatsu with an active area of
$3\times3\,\mathrm{mm^2}$. Employing the Digital Photon Counter from Philips a
time resolution of about 30 ps has been reached.
