Abstract
Silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) offer advantages such as lower relative cost, smaller size, and lower operating voltages compared to photomultiplier tubes. A SiPM’s readout circuit topology can significantly affect the characteristics of an imaging array. In nuclear imaging and detection, energy, timing, and position are the primary characteristics of interest. Nuclear imaging has applications in the medical, astronomy, and high energy physics fields, making SiPMs an active research area. This work is focused on the circuit topologies required for nuclear imaging. We surveyed the readout strategies including the front end preamplification topology choices of transimpedance amplifier, charge amplifier, and voltage amplifier. In addition, a review of circuit topologies suitable for energy, timing, and position information extraction was performed along with a summary of performance limitations and current challenges.
Highlights
Silicon photomultipliers are widely used in a number of different applications in the health, environmental, and scientific discovery fields
SiPMs implemented in commercial CMOS foundries allow for the inclusion of the electronics directly on chip, leading to reduced parasitics and higher throughput and speed
SiPMs are being widely used to replace photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) and other photodetectors in applications such as Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) [4,5,6,7], optical imaging systems [8,9,10,11,12], medical imaging [13,14,15,16,17], fluorescence imaging [18,19,20], astrophysics and gamma detection [21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30] where they may be used in different types of experiments such as time correlated single photon counting [31,32,33]
Summary
Silicon photomultipliers are widely used in a number of different applications in the health, environmental, and scientific discovery fields. It should be noted that all cells do not necessarily fire at the same time, and that there may be a small delay that is not captured in this model This model does not take into account the full probabilistic nature of the photon-induced avalanche process, but is suitable for designing, simulating, and characterizing the readout electronics’ performance before committing to potentially expensive devices or fabrication. Fill factor is typically calculated as the ratio of the optical active area, typically defined by the depletion region of the pn junction, and the area of non-optical-related devices such as resistors and transistors as well as any metal routing combined with the total pn device area This integration of readout and optical devices on the same chip can be accomplished by implementing both the SiPM and electronics in standard CMOS processes [38,39]. Our conclusion summarizes the paper and describes the challenges and possible future paths
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