Charge to digital converter with constant resolution over the dynamic range

A novel pixel-level charge to digital converter circuit suitable for multi-channel charge sensitive amplifiers or pixelated readout ICs for hybrid detectors is presented. The proposed circuit features large dynamic range operation with constant relative resolution over the whole dynamic range. These characteristics have been obtained by introducing the fractional charge packet counting concept. In particular, a solution has been proposed to obtain the analog-to-digital conversion with constant number of significant bits.