  The General Antiparticle Spectrometer (GAPS) is an Antarctic balloon-borne
mission to indirectly search for dark matter through sensitive observation of
cosmic antiparticles. The first flight is planned for late 2021. GAPS is the
first experiment optimized specifically for detection of low-energy (< 0.25
GeV/n) antideuterons, which are recognized as distinctive signals from dark
matter annihilation or decay in the Galactic halo. To achieve high sensitivity
to cosmic antinuclei in this low-energy range, GAPS uses a novel particle
identification method based on exotic atom capture and decay. The GAPS
instrument consists of ten planes of 1440 10 cm-diameter, 2.5 mm-thick, 8-strip
lithium drifted silicon (Si(Li)) detectors, which constitutes the tracker,
surrounded by a plastic scintillator time-of-flight system. A new fabrication
technique has been developed to satisfy the stringent requirements of the
mission. In this contribution, we describe the front-end electronics of the
tracker of GAPS. The system is composed of front-end ASICs and power supplies.
The ASICs provide readout and digitization of the signal (with an 11-bit ADC)
in a wide dynamic range (10 keV - 100 MeV). Every ASIC has 32 channels and
performs the readout for 4 detectors, for a total amount of 11520 channels. The
ASIC analog front-end is based on a dynamic compression technique to handle a
large range of signal amplitudes and features a low noise performance,
achieving the required 4 keV resolution at low energies. The power system
supplies both bias voltages for the Si(Li) detectors and low voltages for the
electronics. 36th
