Performance Evaluation of the Analogue Front-End and ADC Prototypes for the Gotthard-II Development

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the performance of analogue front-end and ADC prototypes for the Gotthard-II silicon microstrip detector, highlighting their suitability for high-speed X-ray applications at the European XFEL.

Contribution

It presents the design, fabrication, and performance assessment of novel analogue front-end and ADC prototypes in UMC-110 nm CMOS technology for the Gotthard-II detector.

Findings

Prototypes demonstrate high-speed, low-noise performance suitable for XFEL applications.

ADC prototypes achieve high resolution and fast conversion rates.

Analogue front-end designs effectively handle adaptive gain switching.

Abstract

Gotthard-II is a silicon microstrip detector developed for the European X-ray Free-Electron Laser (XFEL.EU). Its potential scientific applications include X-ray absorption/emission spectroscopy, hard X-ray high resolution single-shot spectrometry (HiREX), energy dispersive experiments at 4.5 MHz frame rate, beam diagnostics, as well as veto signal generation for pixel detectors. Gotthard-II uses a silicon microstrip sensor with a pitch of 50 $\mu$m or 25 $\mu$m and with 1280 or 2560 channels wire-bonded to readout chips (ROCs). In the ROC, an adaptive gain switching pre-amplifier (PRE), a fully differential Correlated-Double-Sampling (CDS) stage, an Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) as well as a Static Random-Access Memory (SRAM) capable of storing all the 2700 images in an XFEL.EU bunch train will be implemented. Several prototypes with different designs of the analogue front-end (PRE and CDS) and ADC test structures have been fabricated in UMC-110 nm CMOS technology and their performance has been evaluated. In this paper, the performance of the analogue front-end and ADC will be summarized.