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Radiation therapy with proton beams allows the deposition of high doses to the tumour while minimising dose to the surrounding tissue. During such treatment, the patient is also exposed to secondary radiation which produces an out-of-field dose that affects healthy tissue. The largest contribution to this out-of-field dose comes from neutron radiation; therefore, it is of interest to fully characterise the neutron field in the therapy room with measurements. This is usually done with Bonner sphere spectrometers using active detectors, typically 3He-filled proportional counters, as central thermal neutron sensors. Under the experimental conditions encountered in proton therapy facilities, a proper analysis of the measurements is impossible unless dead time corrections are implemented. In this paper, we present a method using a paralysable dead time model for carrying out such corrections for Bonner sphere measurements with 3He-filled proportional counters and apply it to data taken at the University Proton Therapy Dresden (UPTD) facility in double scattering mode. The neutron events were recorded with time stamps and, based on this time-resolved data, the measured neutron rate distribution was sampled. Since the neutron flux is proportional to the proton flux, the integral neutron flux is directly related to the proton dose. Hence, we were able to estimate the detector dead time from the measured rate distributions recorded for a set of measurements with different proton dose rates. Experimental measurements with different intensities of the proton field show that the corrections are in agreement within 0.5% for measured signal rates smaller than 15 × 103 counts per second and do not exceed 1% at 25 × 103 counts per second.

We present the first concept for the analog front-end of the readout ASIC for the XIDer (X-ray Integrating Detector) detector system which is being developed by a collaboration between the ESRF and Heidelberg University. The ESRF's Extremely Brilliant Source (EBS) upgrade which has been completed recently provides X-ray beams of unprecedented quality, requiring new photon detection instruments. The XIDer project has been launched to develop a new versatile pixel detector which will be tailored to match requirements imposed by this upgrade. The core challenges include fast signal acquisition, large dynamic range and single photon sensitivity. A first prototype ASIC for the analog front-end of a single pixel has been manufactured. It is based on a pipelined two-stage charge removal circuit which digitizes the incident signal on the fly. We will present measurement results of the first test chip and concepts for the final system-on-chip implementation integrating several tens of thousands of pixels.

The Medipix3 chips have been designed to permit spectroscopic imaging in highly segmented hybrid pixel detectors. Spectral degradation due to charge sharing in the sensor has been addressed by means of an architecture in which adjacent pixels communicate in the analog and digital domains on an event-by-event basis to reconstruct the deposited charge in a neighbourhood prior to the assignation of the hit to a single pixel. The Medipix3RX chip architecture is presented. The first results for the characterization of the chip with 300 μm thick Si sensors are given. ~ 72e(−) r.m.s. noise and ~ 40e(−) r.m.s. of threshold dispersion after chip equalization have been measured in Single Pixel Mode of operation. The homogeneity of the image in Charge Summing mode is comparable to the Single Pixel Mode image. This demonstrates both modes are suitable for X-ray imaging applications.

A modification of Smith predictor for controlling the higher order processes with integral action ad long dead-time is proposed in this paper. The controller used in this Smith predictor is an Integral-Proportional Derivative controller, where the Integrator is in the forward path and the Proportional and Derivative control are in the feedback, acting on the feedback signal. The main objective of this paper is to design a Dead Time Compensator(DTC), which has minimum tuning parameters, simple controller tuning, robust performance of tuning formulae and to obtain a critically damped system which is as fast as possible in its setpoint and load disturbance rejection performance. The controller in this paper is tuned by an adaptive method. This paper also presents a survey of various dead time compensators and their performance analysis.

HEPS-BPIX3 is a hybrid pixel detector readout chip for X-ray applications for the High Energy Photon Source (HEPS) in China. The readout chip contains an array of 88 × 88 pixels with a pixel size of 55 μm × 55 μm, working in single photon counting mode. Each pixel handles both polarities of positive and negative input charge signals and has a counting depth of 11 bits. Using a clock with a frequency up to 160 MHz, the chip can read out serially with zero dead time. Designed in a 130 nm CMOS technology, the chip has been measured and given the CSA charge gain of 17.6 mV/ke- for electron collection and 13 mV/ke- for hole collection, respectively. Bump-bonded detector modules with a 320-μm-thick silicon sensor were also tested. The test results showed an equivalent input noise of 156 e- and a counting rate up to 2.2 Mcps. Besides, an image using an X-ray tube was demonstrated and a frame rate of 1.8 kHz could be guaranteed. Measured characteristics present the normal functionality of the HEPS-BPIX3 chip and prove that the chip satisfies the HEPS requirements.

We have developed multi-channel signal acquisition with a coincidence digital circuit for a two-dimensional detector array of the small-angle neutron scattering spectrometer (SANS) of the Institute of Nuclear Physical Chemistry at the Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics. This paper discusses how to determine such factors as the coincidence time window and program dead time according to the characteristics of the detector signal and how to correct the timer to realize the data coincidence. The whole system can support up to 192 analog channels connected to a fast analog-to-digital converter, supporting speeds of 50 MSPS for each channel managed by a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The internal clock of the FPGA is 50 MHz and the time accuracy is 20 ns. Preliminary experiments are carried out and the results are presented and discussed. The whole design can fully meet the needs of the spectrometer.

The Timepix3 readout chip - the latest member of the Medipix family of hybrid pixel detectors - brought several new functionalities in comparison with the older Timepix, i.e. a high hit-rate, a time granularity of 1.5625 ns, a data-driven readout scheme (with a per pixel dead time of approximately 475 ns), and the capability of measuring Time-over-Threshold (ToT) and Time-of-Arrival (ToA) in each pixel at the same time. However, the high power consumption of the Timepix3 in the standard setting prevents its use in applications with limited power budget. Moreover, the high power consumption poses the risk of overheating the sensor so that proper cooling is crucial. The presented work investigates the effect of different settings in the analogue and a digital part of the Timepix3 detector on its power consumption. Measurements were performed with the Timepix3 chipboard. The firmware of the Katherine readout was modified so that the user can monitor the power consumptions of analogue and digital part "on-line" (directly in the control software). In standard settings, a power consumption of approximately 1.3 W was found. By changes of internal DACs, the consumption could be reduced to 650 mW. Further reduction was achieved by the change of the clock management in the digital part of the Timepix3. In result, a power consumption of 216 mA could be achieved. In these low power settings, the ToA clock was reduced to 10 MHz and thus the time binning was 100 ns. The energy resolution was not affected significantly. The pixel dead time is also negatively affected when the matrix clock is reduced. In the case of 10 MHz, the minimal per pixel dead time is 1.9 mu s.

A digitizer capable of processing 32-channel signals is designed for a thermal neutron detector array. The field-programmable gate array in the digitizer performs the case selection of extensive air showers that is usually performed on a personal computer. Because the amount of data transmitted to the personal computer is reduced considerably, the problem of data blocking and dead time for a large detector array is solved.

The design of an experimental muon source (EMuS) at the China Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS) has been underway for muon spin rotation, relaxation and resonance (μSR) experiments since 2007. A 128-channel μSR spectrometer prototype is also being developed. We have successfully developed a 32-channel time-to-digital converter (TDC) electronic readout unit module for the μSR spectrometer prototype. It receives timing signals from four front-end electronics (FEEs) and communicates with them. Moreover, it is a standard NIM module with a single field-programmable gate array-based design that meets the following requirements for μSR experiments: a low dead time, an instantaneous high count rate, a relatively long measurement duration, a relatively high resolution, and multiple channel-compatibility. By incorporating look-up tables (LUTs), placement constraints and area constraints, the routing skew of all TDC channels is reduced to less than 4 ps. Furthermore, Gigabit Ethernet data transmission has been incorporated in anticipation of more channels being added in the future.

EMuS (Experimental Muon Source) as the first muon source in China will be built at China Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS). A 128-channel μSR spectrometer prototype is under development for EMuS. As the core part of μSR spectrometer prototype, the detection system (detectors and readout electronics) has been constructed. Beam test (at ISIS Muon Source in U.K.) and magnetic shielding test have been carried out to test the performances of this detection system. In this paper, a new test method has been developed to test the magnetic shielding capability by using the energy spectrum of 22Na source. A magnetic field up to at least 30 Gauss can be eliminated by the proposed shielding. This satisfies the actual requirement of 8 Gauss. The dead time of the prototype detector was measured with a dedicated setup and measured to be 1.4 ns.

The author presents considerations on the design of fast readout front-end electronics implemented in a CMOS 40 nm technology with an emphasis on the system dead time, noise performance and power dissipation. The designed processing channel consists of a charge sensitive amplifier with different feedback types (Krummenacher, resistive and constant current blocks), a threshold setting block, a discriminator and a counter with logic circuitry. The results of schematic and post-layout simulations with randomly generated input pulses in a time domain according to the Poisson distribution are presented and analyzed. Dead time below 20 ns is possible while keeping noise ENC ≈ 90 e− for a detector capacitance CDET = 160 fF.

Comparing with the traditional test system based on a QDC and TDC and scaler, a test system based on waveform sampling is constructed for signal sampling of the 8"R5912 and the 20"R12860 Hamamatsu PMT in different energy states from single to multiple photoelectrons. In order to achieve high throughput and to reduce the dead time in data processing, the data acquisition software based on LabVIEW is developed and runs with a parallel mechanism. The analysis algorithm is realized in LabVIEW and the spectra of charge, amplitude, signal width and rising time are analyzed offline. The results from Charge-to-Digital Converter, Time-to-Digital Converter and waveform sampling are discussed in detailed comparison.

In the readout electronics of the Water Cerenkov Detector Array (WCDA) in the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO), both high-resolution charge and time measurement are required over a dynamic range from 1 photoelectron (P.E.) to 4000 P.E. for the PMT signal readout. In this paper, we present our work on the design of time discrimination circuits in LHAASO WCDA, especially on improvement to reduce the circuit dead time. Several approaches were studied through analysis and simulations, and actual circuits were designed and tested in the laboratory to evaluate the performance. Test results indicate that a time resolution better than 500 ps RMS is achieved in the whole large dynamic range, and the circuit dead time is successfully reduced to less than 200 ns.

We report on the analysis, simulations and measurements of both noise and high-count rate performance of a single photon counting integrated circuit called UFXC32k designed for hybrid pixel detectors for various applications in X-ray imaging. The dimensions of the UFCX32k designed in CMOS 130 nm technology are 9.63 mm × 20.15 mm. The integrated circuit core is a matrix of 128 × 256 squared readout pixels with a pitch of 75 μm. Each readout pixel contains a charge sensitive amplifier (CSA), a shaper, two discriminators and two 14-bit ripple counters. The UFXC32k was bump-bonded to a silicon pixel detector with the thickness of 320 μm and characterized with the X-ray radiation source. The CSA feedback based on the Krummenacher circuit determines both the count rate performance and the noise of the readout front-end electronics. For the default setting of the CSA feedback, the measured front-end electronics dead time is 232 ns (paralyzable model) and the equivalent noise charge (ENC) is equal to 123 el. rms. For the high count rate setting of the CSA feedback, the dead time is only 101 ns and the ENC is equal to 163 el. rms.

The Central Drift Chamber (CDC) is the main device for tracking and identification of charged particles for Belle-II experiment. The Belle-II CDC is cylindrical wire chamber with 14336 sense wires, 2.3 m-length and 2.2 m-diameter. The wire chamber and readout electronics have been completely replaced from the Belle CDC. The new readout electronics system must handle higher trigger rate of 30 kHz with less dead time at the design luminosity of 8 × 1035 cm−2s−1. The front-end electronics are located close to detector and send digitized signal through optical fibers. The Amp-Shaper-Discriminator chips, FADC and FPGA are assembled on a single board. Belle-II CDC with readout electronics has been installed successfully in Belle structure in October 2016. We will present overview of the Belle-II CDC and status of commissioning with cosmic ray.

The Iranian Light Source Facility (ILSF) is a new 3 GeV third generation synchrotron radiation facility in Middle East, which at the time being is in its design stage. For day one operation of the ILSF a custom made two-dimensional multiwire position sensitive detector with delay line readout will be used in small/wide angle scattering and diffraction experiments with synchrotron radiation. For many years such X-ray detectors have played an important role in these synchrotron radiation experiments and owing to their robustness they are still in use in many places. Paired with state of the art read-out electronics they are serious low cost competitors to other solutions based on solid-state hybrid pixel detectors. To achieve minimum dead time and high global count rates these detectors will require preamplifiers with certain characteristics, which involve low noise, good signal/noise ratio (better than 20 dB), high gain, short rise time (lower than 10 ns) and pulse duration shorter than 120 ns. In this paper, we present the design and first results of the evaluation of a voltage preamplifier developed at ILSF within a collaboration agreement between ILSF, Iran and the Italian Synchrotron Radiation Facility (Elettra), Italy. The application of this preamplifier in an in-house multiwire detector is discussed and results are presented.

This paper describes a readout ASIC prototype designed by CHIPIX65 project, part of RD53, for a pixel detector at HL-LHC . A 64 × 64 matrix of 50 × 50 μ m2 pixels is realised. A digital architecture has been developed, with particle efficiency above 99.9% at 3 GHz/cm2 pixel rate, 1 MHz trigger rate with 12.5 μ s latency. Two analog front end designs, one synchronous and one asynchronous, are implemented. Charge is measured with 5-bit precision and the analog dead-time is below 1%. IP-blocks (DAC, ADC, BandGap, SER, sLVS-TX/RX) and very front ends are silicon proven, irradiated to 600-800Mrad.

The track structure of ionizing radiation predominantly determines the biological effects after irradiation. A new detector to register 3D track structure segments in low pressure gas was proposed in a previous work. The device combines the operational principle of thick gas electron multipliers (THGEM), working in reverse polarity, and resistive plate chambers. In this work, the detector was further developed. Optimization of THGEM thickness, hole pitch and cathode resistivity were studied. A new detector prototype was built and tested with a microbeam providing different radiation qualities. The detector rate capability and ion collection efficiency were also investigated. Results show that the detector efficiency increases with increasing THGEM thickness and decreasing cathode resistivity. Preliminary results show that the ion collection efficiency is low and that the detector performance is limited by a long dead time. The detector is able to register single ions with a low dark rate. However, further development is needed in order to obtain the efficiency necessary to reconstruct 3D track structure.

EIGER is a single photon counting hybrid pixel detector being developed at Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), Switzerland, for applications at synchrotron light sources in an energy range from a few to 25 keV. EIGER is characterized by a small pixel size (75 × 75 μm2), a frame rate up to 22 kHz and a small dead time between frames (4 μs). An EIGER module is a hybrid detector composed of a ≈ 8 × 4 cm2 monolithic silicon sensor bump bonded to 4 × 2 readout chips, for a total of 500 kpixels. Each pixel has a configurable depth (up to 12 bits) counter and records the number of photons impinging. Custom designed module electronics reads out the bits in the pixel counter and processes the data in the module before transferring them to a PC. A large dynamic range (32 bits) for the pixel counter can be obtained through on-board image summation. Rate corrections can be applied on-board to compensate for inefficiencies when the pixel counting rates approach pile-up levels around a million counts per second. The EIGER modules are the building blocks of large area detectors: a 1.5 and a 9 Mpixel systems are under development for the cSAXS beamline at the Swiss Light Source (SLS) at PSI. The very high frame rate capabilities are equally fast for multi-module systems due to the fully parallel data processing.The module calibration will be discussed, with emphasis on the choice of the optimal operation settings as a function of photon energy. The performance regarding threshold dispersion and minimum achievable threshold will be presented. In addition, the progress towards the production of larger multi-module systems will be discussed.

The LHCb Vertex Detector (VELO) will be upgraded in 2018 along with the other subsystems of LHCb in order to enable full readout at 40 MHz, with the data fed directly to the software triggering algorithms. The upgraded VELO is a lightweight hybrid pixel detector operating in vacuum in close proximity to the LHC beams. The readout will be provided by a dedicated front-end ASIC, dubbed VeloPix, matched to the LHCb readout requirements and the 55 × 55 μm VELO pixel dimensions. The chip is closely related to the Timepix3, from the Medipix family of ASICs. The principal challenge that the chip has to meet is a hit rate of up to 900 Mhits/s, resulting in a required output bandwidth of more than 16 Gbit/s. The occupancy across the chip is also very non-uniform, and the radiation levels reach an integrated 400 Mrad over the lifetime of the detector.VeloPix is a binary pixel readout chip with a data driven readout, designed in 130 nm CMOS technology. The pixels are combined into groups of 2 × 4 super pixels, enabling a shared logic and a reduction of bandwidth due to combined address and time stamp information. The pixel hits are combined with other simultaneous hits in the same super pixel, time stamped, and immediately driven off-chip. The analog front-end must be sufficiently fast to accurately time stamp the data, with a small enough dead time to minimize data loss in the most occupied regions of the chip. The data is driven off chip with a custom designed high speed serialiser. The current status of the ASIC design, the chip architecture and the simulations will be described.

The ALICE muon trigger is a large scale detector based on single gap bakelite RPCs. An upgrade of the electronics is needed in order to withstand the increase of luminosity after the LHC Long Shutdown-2 in 2018-2019. The detector will be read out at the minimum bias rate of 100 kHz in Pb–Pb collisions (including a safety factor of 2), two orders of magnitude above the present design. For the most exposed RPCs and in the present conditions of operation, the total integrated charge could be as high as 100 mC/cm2 with rates up to 100 Hz/cm2, which is above the present limit for safe operation. In order to overcome these limitations, upgrade projects of the Front-End (FE) and Readout Electronics are scheduled. The readout upgrade at high rate with low dead time requires changing most of the present electronics. It involves a new design for the 234 Local cards receiving the LVDS signals from the FE electronics and the 16 Regional concentrator cards. The readout chain is completed by a single Common Readout Unit developed for most ALICE sub-detectors. The new architecture of the muon trigger readout will be briefly presented. The present FE electronics, designed for the streamer mode, must be replaced to prevent ageing of the RPCs in the future operating conditions. The new FE called FEERIC (for Front-End Electronics Rapid Integrated Circuit) will have to perform amplification of the analog input signals. This will allow for RPC operation in a low-gain avalanche mode, with a much smaller charge deposit (factor 3-5) in the detector as compared to the present conditions. The purpose is to discriminate RPC signals with a charge threshold around 100 fC, in both polarities, and with a time jitter below 1 ns. We will describe the FE card and FEERIC ASIC features and first prototype performance, report on test results obtained on a cosmic test bench and discuss ongoing developments.

Eiger is a single-photon counting x-ray pixel detector being developed at the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI) for applications at synchrotron light sources. It follows the widely utilized and successful Pilatus detector. The main features of Eiger are a pixel size of 75 × 75 μm2, high frame rate capability of 22 kHz and negligible dead time between frames of 4 μs. This article contains a detailed description of Eiger detector systems, from the 500 kpixel single-module detector to large-area multi-modules systems. The calibration and performance of the first 500 kpixel system that is in routine user operation are also presented. Furthermore, a method of calibrating the energy of single-photon counting detectors along the detector gain axis is introduced. This approach has the advantage that the detector settings can be optimized at all energies for count rate capabilities. Rate capabilities of the system are reported for energies between 6 and 16 keV.

Novel large area microchannel plates (MCPs) constructed using micro-capillary arrays functionalized by atomic layer deposition (ALD) have been successfully demonstrated in large format detectors (10 cm and 20 cm) with cross delay line and cross strip readouts. Borosilicate micro-capillary substrates allow robust MCPs to be made in sizes to 20 cm, the intrinsic background rates are low ( 7 C cm−2 extracted charge. We have constructed a number of detectors with these novel MCPs, including a 10 × 10 cm cross strip readout device and 20 × 20 cm delay line readout sensors. The cross strip detector has very high spatial resolution (the 20 μm MCP pores can be resolved, thus obtaining ~ 5k × 5k resolution elements), good time resolution ( 5 million counts/s at 20% dead time), while operating at relatively low gain ( ~ 106). The 20 × 20 cm delay line detectors have achieved spatial resolutions of ~ 50 μm and event rates of several MHz, with good gain and background uniformity and 20% quantum efficiency and good uniformity for large area (20 cm) bialkali photocathodes.

The LHCb collaboration is currently working on the upgrade of the experiment to allow, after 2018, an efficient data collection while running at an instantaneous luminosity of 2x10$^{33}$/cm$^{-2}$s$^{-1}$. The upgrade will allow 40 MHz detector readout, and events will be selected by means of a very flexible software-based trigger. The muon system will be upgraded in two phases. In the first phase, the off-detector readout electronics will be redesigned to allow complete event readout at 40 MHz. Also, part of the channel logical-ORs, used to reduce the total readout channel count, will be removed to reduce dead-time in critical regions. In a second phase, higher-granularity detectors will replace the ones installed in highly irradiated regions, to guarantee efficient muon system performances in the upgrade data taking conditions.

Speed of data processing is regarded as a crucial parameter in the nuclear physics experiment, where a dead time elimination or reduction is needed. In the case of computer-based systems, fast data processing algorithms are necessary to be exploited for saving a computational time and to reduce a total duration of the experiment. Time of measurement is one of the key parameters for implementation of specific experiments. Fast pulse processing algorithm (FPPA) of detector events was developed in LabVIEW™ and is capable to run up to 70% faster compared to the performance of previously used algorithm. The results show increased performance and applicability in complex experiments. Detailed description of the overall algorithm with relevant data flow processing and its utilization in Mossbauer spectrometer is presented.

Ion therapy allows the delivery of highly conformal dose taking advantage of the sharp depth-dose distribution at the Bragg-peak. However, patient positioning errors and anatomical uncertainties can cause dose distortions. To exploit the full potential of ion therapy, an accurate monitoring system of the ion range is needed. Among the proposed methods to monitor the ion range, Positron Emission Tomography (PET) has proven to be the most mature technique, allowing to reconstruct the β+ activity generated in the patient by the nuclear interaction of the ions, that can be acquired during or after the treatment. Taking advantages of the spatial correlation between positron emitters created along the ions path and the dose distribution, it is possible to reconstruct the ion range. Due to the high single rates generated during the beam extraction, the acquisition of the β+ activity is typically performed after the irradiation (cyclotron) or in between the synchrotron spills. Indeed the single photon rate can be one or more orders of magnitude higher than normal for cyclotron. Therefore, acquiring the activity during the beam irradiation requires a detector with a very short dead time. In this work, the DoPET detector, capable of sustaining the high event rate generated during the cyclotron irradiation, is presented. The capability of the system to acquire data during and after the irradiation will be demonstrated by showing the reconstructed activity for different PMMA irradiations performed using clinical dose rates and the 62 MeV proton beam at the CATANA-LNS-INFN. The reconstructed activity widths will be compared with the results obtained by simulating the proton beam interaction with the FLUKA Monte Carlo. The presented data are in good agreement with the FLUKA Monte Carlo.

New generation spectroscopy systems have advanced towards digital pulse processing (DPP) approaches. DPP systems, based on direct digitizing and processing of detector signals, have recently been favoured over analog pulse processing electronics, ensuring higher flexibility, stability, lower dead time, higher throughput and better spectroscopic performance. In this work, we present the performance of a new real time DPP system for X-ray and gamma ray semiconductor detectors. The system is based on a commercial digitizer equipped with a custom DPP firmware, developed by our group, for on-line pulse shape and height analysis. X-ray and gamma ray spectra measurements with cadmium telluride (CdTe) and germanium (Ge) detectors, coupled to resistive-feedback preamplifiers, highlight the excellent performance of the system both at low and high rate environments (up to 800 kcps). A comparison with a conventional analog electronics showed the better high-rate capabilities of the digital approach, in terms of energy resolution and throughput. These results make the proposed DPP system a very attractive tool for both laboratory research and for the development of advanced detection systems for high-rate-resolution spectroscopic imaging, recently proposed in diagnostic medicine, industrial imaging and security screening.

Medipix3 is a photon-counting readout chip for X-ray detection. It has a small pixel size (55 μm) and a high frame rate with zero dead time, which makes it attractive for experiments at synchrotrons. Using Medipix3, DESY are developing the LAMBDA (Large Area Medipix3-Based Detector Array) system. A single LAMBDA module carries either a single large silicon sensor of 1536 by 512 pixels, or two smaller high-Z sensors. The sensor is bonded to 12 Medipix3 chips, and mounted on a ceramic carrier board. The readout system for the module then provides a fast FPGA, a large RAM and four 10 Gigabit Ethernet links to allow operation at high frame rates. Multiple modules may then be tiled together a larger area. Currently, the first large silicon modules have been constructed and tested at low speed, and the firmware for fast readout is being developed.

Fast-neutron detectors are used in a wide range of nuclear physics experiments including studies of elastic and inelastic neutron scattering, charge-exchange reactions, photonuclear reactions, neutron-induced fission, and, especially recently, reactions of radioactive nuclei. Although many of the detectors being developed now are based on technologies that are several decades old, new physics is now accessible due to the advent of advanced accelerators, and these facilities present challenging opportunities for detecting fast neutrons. The choice of detectors, their appropriateness for particular measurements and how they are integrated into experiments will be discussed. Detector arrays are of particular importance these days to study angular distributions or simply to increase the solid angle coverage to increase the data rate. Modeling the response of the detectors has become much more important in order to understand better their response and to calculate effects of neutron scattering in the experimental area, including detector-to-detector scattering. Data acquisition through waveform digitizers is now common and leads to more information from each event as well as significant reductions in dead time and in the complexity of the electronics. At the same time, analyzing waveforms in real time presents challenges in terms of handling large amounts of information. Examples of significant improvements in the utilization of neutron detectors in physics experiments, in the characterization of the detector response, and in signal processing will be presented.

The semiconductor pixel detector Timepix contains an array of 256 ? 256 square pixels with a pitch of 55 ?m. The single quantum counting detector Timepix can also provide information about the energy or arrival time of a particle from every single pixel. This device is a powerful tool for radiation imaging and ionizing particle tracking. The Timepix device can be read-out via a serial or parallel interface enabling speeds of 100 fps or 3200 fps, respectively. The device can be connected to a PC via the USB 2.0 based interface FITPix, which currently supports the serial output of Timepix reaching a speed of 90 fps. FITPix supports adjustable clock frequency and hardware triggering which is a useful tool for the synchronized operation of multiple devices. The FITPix interface can handle up to 16 detectors in daisy chain. The complete system including the FITPix interface and Timepix detector is controlled from the PC by the Pixelman software package. A pipeline structure is now implemented in the new version of the readout interface of FITPix. This version also supports parallel Timepix readout. The pipeline architecture brings the possibility of data preprocessing directly in the hardware. The first pipeline stage converts the raw Timepix data into the form of a matrix or stream of pixel values. Another stage performs further data processing such as event thresholding and data compression. Complex data processing currently performed by Pixelman in the PC is significantly reduced in this way. The described architecture together with the parallel readout increases data throughput reaching a higher frame-rate and reducing the dead time. Significant data compression is performed directly in the hardware especially for sparse data sets from particle tracking applications. The data frame size is typically compressed by factor of 10-100.

We have developed a photon counting detector system for combined neutron and gamma radiography which can determine position, time and intensity of a secondary photon flash created by a high-energy particle or photon within a scintillator screen. The system is based on a micro-channel plate photomultiplier concept utilizing image charge coupling to a position- and time-sensitive read-out anode placed outside the vacuum tube in air, aided by a standard photomultiplier and very fast pulse-height analyzing electronics. Due to the low dead time of all system components it can cope with the high throughput demands of a proposed combined fast neutron and dual discrete energy gamma radiography method (FNDDER). We show tests with different types of delay-line read-out anodes and present a novel pulse-height-to-time converter circuit with its potential to discriminate gamma energies for the projected FNDDER devices for an automated cargo container inspection system (ACCIS)., Proceedings of FNDA 2011

A sensor is fabricated by a two poly-four metal 0.35 μm CMOS process in order to operate in the Geiger mode. The chip consists of an 8 × 8 array of 67 × 67 μm2 pixels that can be readout in either a summing mode or sequential mode. The features of the CMOS single photon avalanche photodiode (CMOS SPAD) were analyzed. The pixels were then arranged in a 8 × 8 array and the possibility of the summing mode and the sequential mode was verified. The CMOS SPAD pixel has a fill factor of 17.4%. The breakdown voltage of the pixel was at 18.9 V, and the photon detection efficiency was 20% at the 550 nm wavelength. The dead time was 20 nsec, and the dark count rate was 10 kHz at and below the single photon level. The operation of both summing mode and sequential mode function was sucessful in the 8 × 8 array sensor.

International audience; SKIROC (Silicon Kalorimeter Integrated ReadOut Chip) is the front end chip designed for the readout of the Silicon PIN diodes foreseen for the Electromagnetic CALorimeter (ECAL) at the future International Linear Collider. The fine granularity of the ILC calorimeters implies an extremely large number of electronics channels (82 millions) which is a new feature of ''imaging'' calorimetry. Moreover, for compactness, the chips must be embedded inside the detector without any external component making essential the reduction of the power consumption to 25 μWatt per channel. This is achieved using power pulsing, made possible by the ILC bunch pattern (1 ms of acquisition data for 199 ms of dead time).

An integrated portable USB based readout interface for the ATLAS semiconductor trackers (SCT) has been built. The ATLAS SCT modules are large area silicon strip detectors designed for tracking of high-energy charged particles resulting in collisions on Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in CERN. These modules can be also used on small accelerators for medical or industry applications where a compact and configurable readout interface would be useful. A complete custom made PC-host software tool was written for Windows platform for control and DAQ with build-in online visualization. The new constructed interface provides integrated power, control and DAQ and configurable communication between the detector module and the controlling PC. The interface is based on the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and the high speed USB 2.0 standard. This design permits to operate the modules under high particle fluence while minimizing the dead time of the whole detection system. Utilization of the programmable device simplifies the operation and permits future expansion of the functionality without any hardware changes. The device includes the high voltage source for detector bias up to 500 V and it is equipped with number of devices for monitoring the operation and conditions of measurement (temperature, humidity, voltage). These features are particularly useful as the strip detector must be operated in a well controlled environment. The operation of the interface will be demonstrated on data measured with different particles from radiation sources.

The architecture and characterisation of the NA62 GigaTracker End of Column Demonstrator Hybrid Pixel Detector (HPD) are presented. This detector must perform time stamping to 200 ps (RMS) or better, provide 300 μm pitch position information and operate with a dead time of 1% or less for 800 MHz−1 GHz beam rate. The demonstrator HPD Assembly comprises a readout chip with a test column of 45 pixels, alongside other test structures, bump bonded to a p-in-n detector 200 μm in thickness. Validation of the performance of the HPD and the time-over-threshold timewalk compensation mechanism with both beam particles and a high precision laser system was performed and is presented. Confirmation of better than the required time stamping precision has been demonstrated and subsequent work on the design of the full-scale ASIC, dubbed TDCPix, is underway. An overview of the TDCPix architecure is given.

Borexino, a liquid scintillator detector at LNGS, is designed for the detection of neutrinos and antineutrinos from the Sun, supernovae, nuclear reactors, and the Earth. The feeble nature of these signals requires a strong suppression of backgrounds below a few MeV. Very low intrinsic radiogenic contamination of all detector components needs to be accompanied by the efficient identification of muons and of muon-induced backgrounds. Muons produce unstable nuclei by spallation processes along their trajectory through the detector whose decays can mimic the expected signals; for isotopes with half-lives longer than a few seconds, the dead time induced by a muon-related veto becomes unacceptably long, unless its application can be restricted to a sub-volume along the muon track. Consequently, not only the identification of muons with very high efficiency but also a precise reconstruction of their tracks is of primary importance for the physics program of the experiment. The Borexino inner detector is surrounded by an outer water-Cherenkov detector that plays a fundamental role in accomplishing this task. The detector design principles and their implementation are described. The strategies adopted to identify muons are reviewed and their efficiency is evaluated. The overall muon veto efficiency is found to be 99.992% or better. Ad-hoc track reconstruction algorithms developed are presented. Their performance is tested against muon events of known direction such as those from the CNGS neutrino beam, test tracks available from a dedicated External Muon Tracker and cosmic muons whose angular distribution reflects the local overburden profile. The achieved angular resolution is 3-5 deg and the lateral resolution is 35-50 cm, depending on the impact parameter of the crossing muon. The methods implemented to efficiently tag cosmogenic neutrons are also presented., Comment: 42 pages. 32 figures on 37 files. Uses JINST.cls. 1 auxiliary file (defines.tex) with TEX macros. submitted to Journal of Instrumentation