  A new approach was developed for the design of front-end circuits for
semiconductor radiation detectors. The readout scheme consists of a first stage
made of only a few components located close to the detector, and of a remote
second stage located far from the detector, several meters away. The second
stage amplifies the signals from the first stage and closes the feedback loop
to discharge the input node after each event. The circuit has two outputs: one
gives a "fast" signal, with a bandwidth larger than 20 MHz, allowing to
preserve the high frequency components of the detector signals, which may be
useful for timing measurements, pile-up rejection or pulse shape
discrimination. The second output gives a "slow" signal, whose gain depends
only on the value of the feedback capacitor, as happens with a classic charge
sensitive amplifier, allowing to obtain higher resolution and lower drift. The
prototype was named GeFRO for Germanium front-end, and was tested with a BEGe
detector from Canberra. The wide bandwidth of the "fast" signal gave a timing
resolution of the order of 20 ns. The noise of the circuit at the "slow" output
after a 10 us Gaussian shaping was close to 160 electrons RMS with an input
capacitance of 26 pF.
