Pixel readout IC for CdTe detectors operating in single photon counting mode with interpixel communication

Abstract

This paper presents a readout integrated circuit (IC) of pixel architecture called MPIX (Multithreshold PIXels), designed for CdTe pixel detectors used in X-ray imaging applications. The MPIX IC area is 9.6 mm × 20.3 mm and it is designed in a CMOS 130 nm process. The IC core is a matrix of 96 × 192 square-shaped pixels of 100 µm pitch. Each pixel contains a fast analog front-end followed by four independently working discriminators and four 12-bit ripple counters. Such pixel architecture allows photon processing one by one and selecting the X-ray photons according to their energy (X-ray colour imaging). To fit the different range of applications the MPIX IC has 8 possible different gain settings, and it can process the X-ray photons of energy up to 154 keV. The MPIX chip is bump-bonded to the CdTe 1.5 mm thick pixel sensor with a pixel pitch of 100 µm. To deal with the charge sharing effect coming from a thick semiconductor pixel sensor, multithreshold pattern recognition algorithm is implemented in the readout IC. The implemented algorithm operates both in the analog domain (to recover the total charge spread between neighboring pixels, when a single X-ray photon hits the border of the pixel) and in the digital domain (to allocate a hit position to a single pixel).