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.

Multi-frequency point supported LLRF front-end for CiADS wide-bandwidth application

The China initiative Accelerator Driven System,CiADS,physics design adopts 162.5 MHz,325 MHz,and 650 MHz cavities,which are driven by the corresponding radio frequency(RF)power system,requiring frequency translation front-end for the RF station.For that application,a general-purpose design front-end prototype has been developed to evaluate the multi-frequency point supported design feasibility.The difficult parts to achieve the requirements of the general-purpose design are reasonable device selection and balanced design.With a carefully selected low-noise wide-band RF mixer and amplifier to balance the performance of multi-frequency supported down-conversion,specially designed LO distribution net to increase isolation between adjacent channels,and external band-pass filter to realize expected up-conversion frequencies,high maintenance and modular front-end generalpurpose design has been implemented.Results of standard parameters show an R2 value of at least 99.991%in the range of-60-10 dBm for linearity,up to 18 dBm for P1dB,and up to 89 dBc for cross talk between adjacent channels.The phase noise spectrum is lower than 80 dBc in the range of 0-1 MHz;cumulative phase noise is 0.006°;and amplitude and phase stability are 0.022%and 0.034°,respectively.

Polyphase Filter Banks for Embedded Sample Rate Changes in Digital Radio Front-Ends

This paper presents efficient processing engines for software-defined radio （SDR） front-ends. These engines, based on a polyphase channelizer, perform arbitrary sample-rate changes, frequency selection, and bandwidth control. This paper presents an M-path polyphase filter bank based on a modified N-path polyphase filter. Such a system allows resampling by arbitrary ratios while performing baseband aliasing from center frequencies at Nyquist zones that are not multiples of the output sample rate. This resampling technique is based on sliding cyclic data load interacting with cyclic-shifted coefficients. A non-maximally-decimated polyphase filterbank （where the number of data loads is not equal to the number of M subfilters） processes M subfilters in a time period that is less than or greater than the M data loads. A polyphase filter bank with five different resampling modes is used as a case study for embedded resamp/ing in SDR front-ends. These modes are （i） maximally decimated, （ii） Under-decimated, （iii） over-decimated, and combined up- and down-sampling with （iv） single stride length, and （v） multiple stride lengths. These modes can be used to obtain any required rational sampling rate change in an SDR front-end based on a polyphase channelizer. They can also be used for translation to and from arbitrary center frequencies that are unrelated to the output sample rates.

A single-ended wideband reconfigurable receiver front-end for multi-mode multi-standard applications in 0.18μm CMOS

This paper presents a reconfigurable RF front-end for multi-mode multi-standard(MMMS) applications. The designed RF front-end is fabricated in 0.18 μm RF CMOS technology. The low noise characteristic is achieved by the noise canceling technique while the bandwidth is enhanced by gate inductive peaking technique. Measurement results show that, while the input frequency ranges from 100 MHz to 2.9 GHz, the proposed reconfigurable RF front-end achieves a controllable voltage conversion gain(VCG) from 18 dB to 39 dB. The measured maximum input third intercept point(IIP3) is-4.9 dBm and the minimum noise figure(NF) is 4.6 dB. The consumed current ranges from 16 mA to 26.5 mA from a 1.8 V supply voltage. The chip occupies an area of 1.17 mm^2 including pads.

A tunable passive mixer for SAW-less front-end with reconfigurable voltage conversion gain and intermediate frequency bandwidth

An adjustable mixer for surface acoustic wave( SAW)-less radio frequency( RF) front-end is presented in this paper. Through changing the bias voltage,the presented mixer with reconfigurable voltage conversion gain( VCG) is suitable for multi-mode multi-standard( MMMS) applications. An equivalent local oscillator( LO) frequency-tunable high-Q band-pass filter( BPF) at low noise amplifier( LNA) output is used to reject the out-of-band interference signals. Base-band( BB) capacitor of the mixer is variable to obtain 15 kinds of intermediate frequency( IF) bandwidth( BW). The proposed passive mixer with LNA is implemented in TSMC 0. 18μm RF CMOS process and operates from 0. 5 to 2. 5 GHz with measured maximum out-of-band rejection larger than 40 d B. The measured VCG of the front-end can be changed from 5 to 17 d B; the maximum input intercept point( IIP3) is0 d Bm and the minimum noise figure( NF) is 3. 7 d B. The chip occupies an area of 0. 44 mm^2 including pads.

The front-end electronics design of dose monitors for beam delivery system of Shanghai Advanced Proton Therapy Facility

A front-end electronics of dose monitor has been developed for measuring irradiation dose to the patient in Shanghai Advanced Proton Therapy Facility.The parallel plate ionization chamber is used for the dose monitoring.Unlike the traditional method of recycling capacitor integration and voltage-to-frequency conversion,this dose monitor electronics uses the trans-impedance amplifier and analog-to-digital conversion method.It performs satisfactorily,with the integral nonlinearity of less than ±0.04 nA in the range of-400 to 50 nA and the resolution of about±0.6 nA.

Study of Reducing Non-Ideal Effects Based on TiN Sensitive Electrode with Front-End Offset Circuit

The structure of the extended gate ion sensitive field effect transistor (EGISFET) is similar to the structure of the ion sensitive field effect transistor (ISFET).Moreover,the non-ideal effect of EGISFET is the main impediment to development of commercial processes for sensitive devices.It is necessary to promote the stability and reliability of the devices by employing calibration circuits and the better fabrication conditions.The temporal drift exists in the entire measurement experiment. Furthermore,in this study we can reduce the temporal drift effect which influences the stability of the TiN sensitive electrode with the differential front-end offset circuit.The measurement system combines with shifting circuit,differential and instrument amplifiers.We employ the calibration circuit to compare with the variations of the output voltage,and expectably improve the stability and reliability of the TiN sensitive electrode by the novel calibration circuit.

Front-end Control Mechanism of Electronic Records

In the digital era,how to ensure the authenticity and integrity of elec-tronic records has become an open challenging issue.Front-end control is an important concept as well as a basic principle in electronic record management.Under the instruction of front-end control,many original management links in the record-management stage are required to move forward,and the managers enter the formation stage of the electronic records to ensure the originality.How-ever,the front-end control technique primarily focuses on transaction manage-ment,and it lacks the strategy of providing the control of electronic records.In this paper,a novel electronic record front-end control mechanism is proposed by adopting proxy re-encryption and requiring archivists to participate in the man-agement of electronic records before the record is created to solve the problem.Specifically,when an electronic record is generated,the proposed mechanism interacts with the producer of the electronic record to generate a corresponding encryption key.Moreover,electronic records are encrypted by the key to protect their confidentiality,which can prevent the leakage of electronic record informa-tion.In addition,when transferring the electronic record,archivists use proxy re-encryption technology to convert electronic records,allowing management by an archivist,ensuring their originality and authenticity.

An Antenna Diversity Scheme for Digital Front-End with OFDM Technology

In,this paper, we propose a new antenna diversity scheme for OFDM-based wireless communication and digital broadcasting applications. Compared with existing schemes, such as post-fast Fourier transform （FFT）, pre-FFT, and polyphase-based fitter-bank, the proposed scheme performs optimally and has very low computational complexity. It offers a better compromise between performance, power consumption, and complexity in real-time implementation of the receivers of broadband communication and digital broadcasting systems.

Transforming Hand Drawn Wireframes into Front-End Code with Deep Learning

The way towards generating a website front end involves a designersettling on an idea for what kind of layout they want the website to have, thenproceeding to plan and implement each aspect one by one until they haveconverted what they initially laid out into its Html front end form, this processcan take a considerable time, especially considering the first draft of the designis traditionally never the final one. This process can take up a large amountof resource real estate, and as we have laid out in this paper, by using a Modelconsisting of various Neural Networks trained on a custom dataset. It can beautomated into assisting designers, allowing them to focus on the other morecomplicated parts of the system they are designing by quickly generating whatwould rather be straightforward busywork. Over the past 20 years, the boomin how much the internet is used and the sheer volume of pages on it demands ahigh level of work and time to create them. For the efficiency of the process, weproposed a multi-model-based architecture on image captioning, consisting ofConvolutional neural network (CNN) and Long short-term memory (LSTM)models. Our proposed approach trained on our custom-made database can beautomated into assisting designers, allowing them to focus on the other morecomplicated part of the system. We trained our model in several batches overa custom-made dataset consisting of over 6300 files and were finally able toachieve a Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) score for a batch of 50hand-drawn images at 87.86%.

Advances in Digital Front-End and Software RF Processing: PartⅡ

In the first editorial of this two-part special issue, we pointed out that one of the biggest trends in wireless broadband, radar, sonar, and broadcasting technology is software RF processing and digital front-end [1]. Thistrend encompasses signal processing algorithms and integrated circuit design and includes digital pre-distortion （DPD）, conversions between digital and analog signals, digita up-conversion （DUC）, digital down-conversion （DDC）, DC offset,

A Broadband T/R Front-End of Millimeter Wave Holographic Imaging

A broadband T/R frond-end of active holographic imaging system is presented. Compact autodyne mode circuit structure front-end is adopted to achieve higher signal to noise ratio and higher reliability, which is beneficial to the after-end imagining. The factors that influence the dynamic range and the transverse resolution ratio of holographic imaging system have been analyzed. Wide-band oscillator, wide-band low noise amplifier and the tapered slot antennas are implemented to meet the requirements of the holographic imagining system. According to the measured results, the output power is uniform in the broadband working frequency. The sub-harmonic suppression is better than 25 dBc from the frequency of 28 GHz to 33 GHz. The isolation between antennas channel is greater than 20 dB. The experimental result shows that the performance of the front-end is good enough to meet the needs of active millimeter-wave holographic imaging system.

A New X-band Weather Radar System with Distributed Phased-Array Front-ends: Development and Preliminary Observation Results

A novel weather radar system with distributed phased-array front-ends was developed. The specifications and preliminary data synthesis of this system are presented, which comprises one back-end and three or more front-ends. Each front-end, which utilizes a phased-array digital beamforming technology, sequentially transmits four 22.5°-width beams to cover the 0°–90° elevational scan within about 0.05 s. The azimuthal detection is completed by one mechanical scan of0°–360° azimuths within about 12 s volume-scan update time. In the case of three front-ends, they are deployed according to an acute triangle to form a fine detection area(FDA). Because of the triangular deployment of multiple phased-array front-ends and a unique synchronized azimuthal scanning(SAS) rule, this new radar system is named Array Weather Radar(AWR). The back-end controls the front-ends to scan strictly in accordance with the SAS rule that assures the data time differences(DTD) among the three front-ends are less than 2 s for the same detection point in the FDA. The SAS can maintain DTD < 2 s for an expanded seven-front-end AWR. With the smallest DTD, gridded wind fields are derived from AWR data, by sampling of the interpolated grid, onto a rectangular grid of 100 m ×100 m ×100 m at a 12 s temporal resolution in the FDA. The first X-band single-polarized three-front-end AWR was deployed in field experiments in 2018 at Huanghua International Airport, China. Having completed the data synthesis and processing, the preliminary observation results of the first AWR are described herein.

Advances in Digital Front-End and Software RF Processing:Part I

One of the biggest technology trends in wireless broadband, radar, sonar, and broadcasting systems is software radio frequency processing and digital front-end. This trend encompasses a broad range of topics, from circuit design and signal processing to system integration. It includes digital up-conversion （DUC） and down-conversion （DDC）, digital predistortion （DPD）,

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 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.

Reconfigurable Ultrasonic Testing System Development Using Programmable Analog Front-End and Reconfigurable System-on-Chip Hardware

Ultrasonic testing systems have been extensively used in medical imaging and non-destructive testing applications. Generally, these systems aim at a particular application or target material. To make these systems portable and more adaptable to the test environments, this study presents a reconfigurable ultrasonic testing system (RUTS), which possesses dynamic reconfiguration capabilities. RUTS consists a fully programmable Analog Front-End (AFE), which facilitates beamforming and signal conditioning for variety of applications. RUTS AFE supports up to 8 transducers for phased-array implementation. Xilinx Zynq System-on-Chip (SoC) based Zedboard provides the back-end processing of RUTS. The powerful ARM embedded processor available within Zynq SoC manages the ultrasonic data acquisition/processing and overall system control, which makes RUTS a unique platform for the ultrasonic researchers to experiment and evaluate a wide range of real-time ultrasonic signal processing applications. This Linux-based system is utilized for ultra-sonic data compression implementation providing a versatile environment for further development of ultrasonic imaging and testing system. Furthermore, this study demonstrates the capabilities of RUTS by performing ultrasonic data acquisition and data compression in real-time. Thus, this reconfigurable system enables ultrasonic designers and researchers to efficiently prototype different experiments and to incorporate and analyze high performance ultrasonic signal and image processing algorithms.

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 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.

Low-temperature metal–oxide thin-film transistor technologies for implementing flexible electronic circuits and systems

Here we review two 300℃metal–oxide(MO)thin-film transistor(TFT)technologies for the implementation of flexible electronic circuits and systems.Fluorination-enhanced TFTs for suppressing the variation and shift of turn-on voltage(VON),and dual-gate TFTs for acquiring sensor signals and modulating VON have been deployed to improve the robustness and performance of the systems in which they are deployed.Digital circuit building blocks based on fluorinated TFTs have been designed,fabricated,and characterized,which demonstrate the utility of the proposed low-temperature TFT technologies for implementing flexible electronic systems.The construction and characterization of an analog front-end system for the acquisition of bio-potential signals and an active-matrix sensor array for the acquisition of tactile images have been reported recently.