NECTAR: New Electronics for the Cherenkov Telescope Array

CTA is the next-generation Cherenkov Telescope Array currently under development by the international CTA consortium, based on experience from the three major telescope arrays of the current generation, H.E.S.S., MAGIC and VERITAS. A new kind of front-end hardware, both powerful and flexible, yet inexpensive, will be required to achieve a sensitivity and energy range which is hitherto unprecedented for TeV gamma rays. One possible solution to equip the up to 100 planned telescopes (with a total of around 100000 photodetector channels) while providing a high degree of flexibility for both triggering and telescope readout is offered by the NECTAr system (New Electronics for the Cherenkov Telescope Array), integrating as much of the front-end functionality as possible into a single ASIC (including pre-amplifiers, fast analog samplers, memory and ADCs). The current status of its development, together with results from measurements and simulations are presented