A 256 energy bin spectrum X-ray photon-counting image sensor providing 8Mcounts/s/pixel and on-chip charge sharing, charge induction and pile-up corrections

A. Peizerat (1) , J-P. Rostaing (1) , P. Ouvrier-Buffet (1) , S. Stanchina (1) , P. Radisson (2) , E. Marche (2)

1 CEA-LETI - Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives - Laboratoire d'Electronique et de Technologie de l'Information
2 MULTIX SA

To achieve better and faster material discrimination in applications like security inspection, X-Ray image sensors giving a highly resolved energy spectrum per pixel are required. In this paper, a new pixel architecture for spectral imaging is presented, exhibiting a 256 bin spectrum per pixel in a single image duration, up to two orders of magnitude higher than previous works. A prototype circuit, composed of 4x8 pixels of 756$\mu$mx800$\mu$m and hybridized to a CdTe crystal, was fabricated in a 0.13$\mu$m process. Our pixel architecture has been measured at 8 Mcounts/s/pixel while embedding on-chip charge sharing, charge induction and pile-up corrections

Keywords: X-ray; imager; CMOS; pixel; spectrum

Domains: Engineering Sciences [physics]; Micro and nanotechnologies/Microelectronics; Signal and Image processing

A. Peizerat, J-P. Rostaing, P. Ouvrier-Buffet, S. Stanchina, P. Radisson, et al.. A 256 energy bin spectrum X-ray photon-counting image sensor providing 8Mcounts/s/pixel and on-chip charge sharing, charge induction and pile-up corrections. 2017 Symposium on VLSI Circuits (978-4-86348-606-5), Jun 2017, Kyoto, Japan. pp.C246-C247, ⟨10.23919/VLSIC.2017.8008496⟩. ⟨cea-02194515⟩