A low-noise 64-channel front-end readout ASIC for CdZnTe detectors aimed to hard X-ray imaging systems

In this paper, we report on the recent development of a 64-channel low-noise front-end readout ASIC for CdZnTe detectors aimed to hard X-ray imaging systems. The readout channel is comprised of a charge sensitive amplifier, a leakage current compensation circuit, a CR-RC shaper, two S-K filters, an inverse proportional amplifier, a peak-detect-and-hold circuit, a discriminator and trigger logic, a time sequence control circuit and a driving buffer. The readout ASIC is implemented in TSMC 0.35 μm mixed-signal CMOS technology, the die size of the prototype chip is 2.7 mm×8.0 mm. The overall gain of the readout channel is 200 mV/fC, the power consumption is less than 8 mW/channel, the linearity error is less than 1%, the inconsistency among the channels is less than 2.86%, and the equivalent noise charge of a typical channel is 66 e− at zero farad plus 14 e− per picofarad. By connecting this readout ASIC to an 8×8 pixel CdZnTe detector, we obtained an energy spectrum, the energy resolution of which is 4.5% at the 59.5 keV line of 241Am source.