Design of a Low-Noise Front-End Readout CSP-Shaper System for CZT Detectors

This paper describes a low-noise front-end readout circuit for CZT detectors based on TSMC 0.35 um mixed-single CMOS technology;mainly analyzes the noise model of the detector-preamplifier and presents the low-noise circuit schematic of charge sensitive preamplifier and shaper. Considering the parasitical influences, the circuit and layout-design are optimized to reduce noise. The preliminary simulation results show that, the equivalent noise charge (ENC) is 74 e﹣ (rms), noise slope is 9 e﹣/pF, power consumption is 2 mW, and non-linearity

Design of a Novel Front-End Readout ASIC for PET Imaging System

The architecture of a multi-channel front-end system is important for realizing a high-resolution PET system. We propose a novel front-end readout electronic system with TDC to deal with time information for PET system which can easily design the timing control. Each channel consists of a charge preamplifier, slow/fast shaper, discriminator and an analog memory. There are an ADC and a TDC to process the energy information and time information for each channel at the same time. In this paper, the whole system signals flow is all simulated by MATLAB. The simulation results show that the proposed system can process slender current from the detector and achieve the energy and time information. The proposed architecture can be applied to high-resolution PET imaging systems with multi-channel ASICs.

Design of a Low-Noise Front-End Readout Circuit for CdZnTe Detectors

In this paper, the design of a novel low-noise front-end readout circuit for Cadmium zinc telluride (CdZnTe) X-ray and γ-ray detectors is described. The front-end readout circuits include the charge sensitive amplifier (CSA) and the CR-RC shaper is implemented in TSMC 0.35 μm mixed-signal CMOS technology. The die size of the prototype chip is 4.9 mm × 2.2 mm. The simulation results show that, the noise performance is 46 electrons + 10 electrons/pF, and power consumption is 1.65 mW per channel.

Threshold-independent method for single-shot readout of spin qubits in semiconductor quantum dots

The single-shot readout data process is essential for the realization of high-fidelity qubits and fault-tolerant quantum algorithms in semiconductor quantum dots. However, the fidelity and visibility of the readout process are sensitive to the choice of the thresholds and limited by the experimental hardware. By demonstrating the linear dependence between the measured spin state probabilities and readout visibilities along with dark counts, we describe an alternative threshold-independent method for the single-shot readout of spin qubits in semiconductor quantum dots. We can obtain the extrapolated spin state probabilities of the prepared probabilities of the excited spin state through the threshold-independent method. We then analyze the corresponding errors of the method, finding that errors of the extrapolated probabilities cannot be neglected with no constraints on the readout time and threshold voltage. Therefore, by limiting the readout time and threshold voltage, we ensure the accuracy of the extrapolated probability. We then prove that the efficiency and robustness of this method are 60 times larger than those of the most commonly used method. Moreover, we discuss the influence of the electron temperature on the effective area with a fixed external magnetic field and provide a preliminary demonstration for a single-shot readout of up to 0.7K/1.5T in the future.

Low-power SiPM readout BETA ASIC for space applications

The BETA application-specific integrated circuit(ASIC)is a fully programmable chip designed to amplify,shape and digitize the signal of up to 64 Silicon photomultiplier(SiPM)channels,with a power consumption of approximately~1 mW/channel.Owing to its dual-path gain,the BETA chip is capable of resolving single photoelectrons(phes)with a signal-to-noise ratio(SNR)>5 while simultaneously achieving a dynamic range of~4000 phes.Thus,BETA can provide a cost-effective solution for the readout of SiPMs in space missions and other applications with a maximum rate below 10 kHz.In this study,we describe the key characteristics of the BETA ASIC and present an evaluation of the performance of its 16-channel version,which is implemented using 130 nm technology.The ASIC also contains two discriminators that can provide trigger signals with a time jitter down to 400 ps FWHM for 10 phes.The linearity error of the charge gain measurement was less than 2%for a dynamic range as large as 15 bits.

Design and prototyping of the readout electronics for the transition radiation detector in the high energy cosmic radiation detection facility

The high energy cosmic-radiation detection(HERD)facility is planned to launch in 2027 and scheduled to be installed on the China Space Station.It serves as a dark matter particle detector,a cosmic ray instrument,and an observatory for high-energy gamma rays.A transition radiation detector placed on one of its lateral sides serves dual purpose,(ⅰ)calibrating HERD's electromagnetic calorimeter in the TeV energy range,and(ⅱ)serving as an independent detector for high-energy gamma rays.In this paper,the prototype readout electronics design of the transition radiation detector is demonstrated,which aims to accurately measure the charge of the anodes using the SAMPA application specific integrated circuit chip.The electronic performance of the prototype system is evaluated in terms of noise,linearity,and resolution.Through the presented design,each electronic channel can achieve a dynamic range of 0–100 fC,the RMS noise level not exceeding 0.15 fC,and the integral nonlinearity was<0.2%.To further verify the readout electronic performance,a joint test with the detector was carried out,and the results show that the prototype system can satisfy the requirements of the detector's scientific goals.

Studies of an event-building algorithm of the readout system for the twin TPCs in HFRS

The High-energy Fragment Separator(HFRS),which is currently under construction,is a leading international radioactive beam device.Multiple sets of position-sensitive twin time projection chamber(TPC)detectors are distributed on HFRS for particle identification and beam monitoring.The twin TPCs'readout electronics system operates in a trigger-less mode due to its high counting rate,leading to a challenge of handling large amounts of data.To address this problem,we introduced an event-building algorithm.This algorithm employs a hierarchical processing strategy to compress data during transmission and aggregation.In addition,it reconstructs twin TPCs'events online and stores only the reconstructed particle information,which significantly reduces the burden on data transmission and storage resources.Simulation studies demonstrated that the algorithm accurately matches twin TPCs'events and reduces more than 98%of the data volume at a counting rate of 500 kHz/channel.

Quantum generative adversarial networks based on a readout error mitigation method with fault tolerant mechanism

Readout errors caused by measurement noise are a significant source of errors in quantum circuits,which severely affect the output results and are an urgent problem to be solved in noisy-intermediate scale quantum(NISQ)computing.In this paper,we use the bit-flip averaging(BFA)method to mitigate frequent readout errors in quantum generative adversarial networks(QGAN)for image generation,which simplifies the response matrix structure by averaging the qubits for each random bit-flip in advance,successfully solving problems with high cost of measurement for traditional error mitigation methods.Our experiments were simulated in Qiskit using the handwritten digit image recognition dataset under the BFA-based method,the Kullback-Leibler(KL)divergence of the generated images converges to 0.04,0.05,and 0.1 for readout error probabilities of p=0.01,p=0.05,and p=0.1,respectively.Additionally,by evaluating the fidelity of the quantum states representing the images,we observe average fidelity values of 0.97,0.96,and 0.95 for the three readout error probabilities,respectively.These results demonstrate the robustness of the model in mitigating readout errors and provide a highly fault tolerant mechanism for image generation models.

Development of front-end readout electronics for silicon strip detectors

Front-end readout electronics have been developed for silicon strip detectors at our institute. In this system an Application Specific Integrated Circuit （ASIC） ATHED is used to realize multi-channel energy and time measurements. The slow control of ASIC chips is achieved by parallel port and the timing control signals of ASIC chips are implemented with the CPLD. The data acquisition is carried out with a PXI-DAQ card. The software has a user-friendly GUI developed with LabWindows/CVI in the Windows XP operating system. The test results show that the energy resolution is about 1.14% for alpha at 5.48 MeV and the maximum channel crosstalk of the system is 4.60%. The performance of the system is very reliable and is suitable for nuclear physics experiments.

Design of a high-dynamic-range prototype readout system for VLAST calorimeter

In the future, the Very Large Area gamma-ray Space Telescope is expected to observe high-energy electrons and gamma rays in the MeV to TeV range with unprecedented acceptance. As part of the detector suite, a high-energy imaging calorimeter(HEIC) is currently being developed as a homogeneous calorimeter that utilizes long bismuth germanate(BGO) scintillation crystals as both absorbers and detectors. To accurately measure the energy deposition in the BGO bar of HEIC, a highdynamic-range readout method using a silicon photomultiplier(SiPM) and multiphotodiode(PD) with different active areas has been proposed. A prototype readout system that adopts multichannel charge measurement ASICs was also developed to read out the combined system of SiPMs and PDs. Preliminary tests confirmed the feasibility of the readout scheme, which is expected to have a dynamic range close to 10~6.

Ultra-low Power CMOS Front-End Readout ASIC for Portable Digital Radiation Detector

An ultra-low power complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor （CMOS） front-end readout ASIC was developed for a portable digital radiation detector. The ASIC having a charge sensitive amplifier and a semi-Gaussian pulse-shaper was produced using the CSMC 0.5 μm DPDM process. The ENC noise of 363 e at 0 pF with a noise slope of 23 e/pF complies with the stringent low noise requirements. The peaking time was 250 ns at a 100 mV/fC conversion gain （detector capacitance is 20 pF）. By operating this frontend readout ASIC in the weak inversion region, the ultra-low power dissipation is only 0.1 mW/channel （3.0 V） Simulations and test results suggest that this design gives lower power consumption than the front-end readout ASICs working in the strong inversion and is appropriate for the portable digital radiation detectors.

FPGA Optimized Accelerator of DCNN with Fast Data Readout and Multiplier Sharing Strategy

With the continuous development of deep learning,Deep Convolutional Neural Network(DCNN)has attracted wide attention in the industry due to its high accuracy in image classification.Compared with other DCNN hard-ware deployment platforms,Field Programmable Gate Array(FPGA)has the advantages of being programmable,low power consumption,parallelism,and low cost.However,the enormous amount of calculation of DCNN and the limited logic capacity of FPGA restrict the energy efficiency of the DCNN accelerator.The traditional sequential sliding window method can improve the throughput of the DCNN accelerator by data multiplexing,but this method’s data multiplexing rate is low because it repeatedly reads the data between rows.This paper proposes a fast data readout strategy via the circular sliding window data reading method,it can improve the multiplexing rate of data between rows by optimizing the memory access order of input data.In addition,the multiplication bit width of the DCNN accelerator is much smaller than that of the Digital Signal Processing(DSP)on the FPGA,which means that there will be a waste of resources if a multiplication uses a single DSP.A multiplier sharing strategy is proposed,the multiplier of the accelerator is customized so that a single DSP block can complete multiple groups of 4,6,and 8-bit signed multiplication in parallel.Finally,based on two strategies of appeal,an FPGA optimized accelerator is proposed.The accelerator is customized by Verilog language and deployed on Xilinx VCU118.When the accelerator recognizes the CIRFAR-10 dataset,its energy efficiency is 39.98 GOPS/W,which provides 1.73×speedup energy efficiency over previous DCNN FPGA accelerators.When the accelerator recognizes the IMAGENET dataset,its energy efficiency is 41.12 GOPS/W,which shows 1.28×−3.14×energy efficiency compared with others.

Advances in nuclear detection and readout techniques

“A Craftsman Must Sharpen His Tools to Do His Job,”said Confucius.Nuclear detection and readout techniques are the foundation of particle physics,nuclear physics,and particle astrophysics to reveal the nature of the universe.Also,they are being increasingly used in other disciplines like nuclear power generation,life sciences,environmental sciences,medical sciences,etc.The article reviews the short history,recent development,and trend of nuclear detection and readout techniques,covering Semiconductor Detector,Gaseous Detector,Scintillation Detector,Cherenkov Detector,Transition Radiation Detector,and Readout Techniques.By explaining the principle and using examples,we hope to help the interested reader underst and this research field and bring exciting information to the community.

Edims: an event-driven internal memory synchronized readout prototype ASIC chip developed for HFRS-TPC

HFRS(HIAF FRagment Separator) will be the radioactive secondary beam separation line on High-Intensity heavy-ion Accelerator Facility(HIAF) in China. Several TPC detectors, with high count rates, are planned for particle identification and beam monitoring at HFRS. This paper presents an event-driven internal memory and synchronous readout(EDIMS)prototype ASIC chip. The aim is to provide HFRS-TPC with high-precision time and charge measurements with high count rates and a large dynamic range. The first prototype EDIMS chip integrated 16 channels and is fabricated using a 0.18-μm CMOS process. Each channel consists of a charge-sensitive amplifier, fast shaper, slow shaper, peak detect-and-hold circuit, discriminator with time-walk compensation, analog memory, and FIFO. The token ring is used for clock-synchronous readout. The chip is taped and tested.

天文应用红外焦平面读出电路研究

成功设计了一款天文应用的640×512短波红外焦平面读出电路。由于红外天文观测具有极低背景辐射、光子通量低的特点,为了实现探测器的高信噪比,需要降低器件的暗电流和电路噪声。电路采用有效的功耗管理策略,在保证电路正常工作的前提下尽可能地降低电路功耗以减小电路辉光对器件暗电流的影响。同时,研究非破坏性读出的数字功能,实现了超长的积分时间和信号的多帧累积,并作为一种斜坡采样的策略有效地降低读出噪声。短波HgCdTe焦平面的测试结果符合理论设计预期,开启电路非破坏性读出功能,设置6 000 s的积分时间,当电路功耗调低至14.04 mW时暗电流为0.9 e-·pixel^(-1)·s^(-1)。读出噪声在两档增益下分别为50 e-(10 fF)和27 e-(5 fF),非线性度低于0.1%。

集成芯片硅微条探测器电子读出系统设计

设计了基于VATA460.3专用集成芯片(ASIC)的多通道、低功耗带触发硅微条探测器读出系统,该系统实现了共32路粒子入射信息读出。测试结果表明:该系统各通道基线稳定,等效噪声水平均低于0.17 fC,动态范围可达90 fC。

高速数字化三维集成式CCD-CMOS图像传感器

为了解决CCD与CMOS工艺兼容性低、互连集成制作难度大,以及芯片间接口匹配和高性能兼备等问题,对CCD器件拓扑结构与像元、CMOS读出电路、三维异质互连集成及高密度引脚封装等技术进行研究,提出了一种1024×256阵列规模的集成式CCD-CMOS图像传感器。该器件实现了CCD信号的高精度数字化处理、高速输出及多芯粒的技术融合,填补了国内CCDCMOS三维集成技术空白。测试结果表明:集成CCD-CMOS器件的光响应和成像功能正常,双边成像效果良好,图像无黑条和坏列,互连连通率(99.9%)满足三维集成要求,实现了集成式探测器件的大满阱高灵敏度成像(满阱电子数达165.28ke^(-)、峰值量子效率达86.1%)、高精度数字化(12bit)和高速输出(行频率达100.85kHz),满足集成化、数字化、小型化的多光谱探测成像系统要求。

基于磁性传感器的低失调温度补偿接口电路设计

面向磁性传感器在物联网(IoT)技术中的广泛应用,该文基于180 nm CMOS工艺设计了一种具有低失调电压,低温度漂移特性的霍尔传感器接口电路。针对霍尔传感器灵敏度的温度漂移特性,该文设计了一种感温电路并与查表法相结合,调节可编程增益放大器(PGA)的增益有效地降低了霍尔传感器的温度系数(TC)。在此基础上,通过在信号主通路中使用相关双采样(CDS)技术,极大程度上消除了霍尔传感器的失调电压。仿真结果表明,在–40°C~125°C温度范围内,霍尔传感器的TC从966.4 ppm/°C减小到了58.1 ppm/°C。信号主通路的流片结果表明,霍尔传感器的失调电压从25 mV左右减小到了4 mV左右,霍尔传感器的非线性误差为0.50%。芯片的总面积为0.69 mm^(2)。

一种集成图像处理功能的数字像元焦平面读出电路

设计了一种像元级数字化焦平面读出电路,克服了传统模拟读出电路技术的电荷容量局限,实现了更大的动态范围和更低噪声的数字化图像读出;同时在像元内部进行数字化图像处理,可实现非均匀校正(NUC)、盲元补偿、数字时间延迟积分(TDI)、空间滤波等图像预处理功能。该电路采用40 nm CMOS工艺流片,面阵规格为640×512,像元步进为30μm,全芯片尺寸约22 mm×19 mm。测试结果显示,该电路通过TDI、空间滤波功能可大幅降低(分别约90%和63%)输出图像空间噪声,提升成像质量。

Design and Analysis of Analog Front-End of Passive RFID Transponders

An analog front-end of HF passive RFID transponders compatible with ISO/IEC 18000-3 is presented.Design considerations, especially the power transmission in the RFID transponder, are analyzed. Based on these considerations,an analog front-end is presented with novel architecture, high power conversion efficiency, low voltage, low power consumption, and high performance in an environment of noise and power fluctuation. The circuit is implemented in a Chartered 0.35μm standard CMOS process. The experimental results show that the chip can satisfy the design target well.