Readout of scintillating plastic fibers with an APD array and prototype ASIC

John R. Macri, Alan L. Wintenberg, Mark Widholm, Usha Jagadish, James Ledoux, Mark L. McConnell, S. Shane Frank, Hansford Cutlip

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

We report on the development of custom front-end electronics for use with avalanche photodiode (APD) arrays as part of a NASA technology study for the readout of scintillating plastic fibers. APD arrays featuring 64 1 mm square pixels are used. We demonstrate that a pixel of these APD arrays coupled to relatively thin (0.25 mm) and short (15 cm) scintillating plastic fibers can be used to detect and measure the tracks of even minimum ionizing particles. An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) implementation of the electronics is required to produce a detector sufficiently compact for practical use in a space flight experiment featuring many thousands of channels. This paper briefly describes the detector concept and performance and presents the design and performance of a four-channel prototype ASIC fabricated using the 0.35 μ Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) process.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)928-935
Number of pages8
JournalIEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science
Volume50
Issue number4 II
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 2003

Funding

Manuscript received May 12, 2003; revised July 9, 2003. This work was supported by NASA’s Explorer Technology Development Program under the University of New Hampshire Grant NAG5-8641.

Keywords

  • Application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC)
  • Avalanche photodiode (APD)
  • Complimentary metal-oxide-semiconductor
  • Low power
  • Scintillating fiber

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