KEYWORDS: Sensors, Capacitance, Electronics, Amplifiers, Analog electronics, Solid state electronics, Prototyping, Calibration, Signal detection, Silicon
A mixed signal Application Specific Integrated Circuit chip for front end readout electronics of position sensitive solid state detectors has been developed. It is called RENA. This chip can be used for large number of channels and high energy resolution astrophysics and nuclear physics detectors. It can also be used for medical and industrial imaging of x-rays and gamma rays. The RENA chip is a monolithic integrated circuit and has 32 channels with low noise charge sensitive amplifiers followed by a polarity amplifier and a high quality shaper circuit. It works in pulse counting mode with good energy resolution. It also has a self triggering output which is essential for nuclear applications when the incident radiation arrives at random. Different, externally selectable, operational modes that include a sparse readout mode are available to increase data throughput. It also has externally selectable shaping times. A full scale prototype RENA chip has been manufactured. The preliminary results of test done on the prototype chip are presented.
Recently the need for a higher level of integration in x-ray and gamma ray sensor systems has lead to several approaches of integrating read out electronics in a monolithic integrated circuit (IC). Typically these ICs are limited in their application to a specific problem. The Readout Electronics for Nuclear Applications (RENA) Integrated Circuit, presented here, is targeted for use in many energy sensor applications. The RENA IC has 32 parallel signal channels with, signal polarity control for use with either electron or hole collection from detectors. The input amplifier is optimized for a detector capacitance of 6 pF, but may be used with detector capacitances up to 50 pF. The Shapers' peaking time is digitally selectable, for optimum noise filtering, with peaking times geometrically spaced from 400 ns to 6 microsecond(s) . Up to 16 RENA ASICs may be daisy chained together to make a system with 512 detector channels. Various trigger modes are available with a user- defined threshold over the full signal range of 50K electronics. The circuits in the RENA are designed to be stable with no 'tweaking' control,s which allows an easy user interfaces.
Coded mask imagers for future high energy x-ray astronomy missions will require detector planes with areas of hundreds to thousands of cm2 and position resolutions < 1 mm. Such detectors will enable coded mask imagers to discover and study thousands of high energy x-ray sources. The UCSD/WU/UCR/NOVA collaboration has been developing CZT detector systems with crossed-strip readout to meet these requirements. We report progress on a compact detector module with 41 cm2 area and 0.5 mm spatial resolution. The design includes the bias network and ASIC readout electronics, and allows modules to be combined in large area arrays with very high live-area factors. Results from laboratory and balloon flight tests are presented.
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