Development of high performance readoutASICs for silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs)

Abstract

Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPMs) are novel kind of solid state photon detectors with ex- tremely high photon detection resolution. They are composed of hundreds or thousands of avalanche photon diode pixels connected in parallel. These avalanche photon diodes are operated in Geiger Mode. SiPMs have the same magnitude of multiplication gain compared to the conventional photomultipliers (PMTs). Moreover, they have a lot of advantages such as compactness, relatively low bias voltage and magnetic field immunity etc. Special readout electronics are required to preserve the high performance of the detector. KLauS and STiC are two CMOS ASIC chips designed in particular for SiPMs. KLauS is used for SiPM charge readout applications. Since SiPMs have a much larger detector capacitance compared to other solid state photon detectors such as PIN diodes and APDs, a few special techniques are used inside the chip to make sure a descent signal to noise ratio for pixel charge signal can be obtained. STiC is a chip dedicated to SiPM time-of-flight applications. High bandwidth and low jitter design schemes are mandatory for such applications where time jitter less than tens of picosends is required. Design schemes and error analysis as well as measurement results are presented in the thesis.