X-ray characterization of BUSARD chip: A HV-SOI monolithic particle detector with pixel sensors under the buried oxide

TL;DR

This paper introduces BUSARD, a monolithic HV-SOI pixel detector ASIC for ionizing particles, demonstrating initial X-ray characterization and energy calibration with promising resolution metrics.

Contribution

The work presents the design and initial X-ray characterization of BUSARD, a novel HV-SOI monolithic pixel detector with integrated digital processing for particle detection.

Findings

Achieved energy calibration using X-ray spectra.

Measured Molybdenum Kα emission with low ENC.

Demonstrated detector operation modes including particle counting and ToT.

Abstract

This work presents the design of BUSARD, an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for the detection of ionizing particles. The ASIC is a monolithic active pixel sensor which has been fabricated in a High-Voltage Silicon-On-Insulator (HV-SOI) process that allows the fabrication of a buried N+ diffusion below the Buried OXide (BOX) as a standard processing step. The first version of the chip, BUSARD-A, takes advantage of this buried diffusion as an ionizing particle sensor. It includes a small array of 13$\times$13 pixels, with a pitch of $80\,\mu$m, and each pixel has one buried diffusion with a charge amplifier, discriminator with offset tuning and digital processing. The detector has several operation modes including particle counting and Time-over-Threshold (ToT). An initial X-ray characterization of the detector was carried out, obtaining several pulse height and ToT spectra, which then were used to perform the energy calibration of the device. The Molybdenum $\mathbf{K_{\alpha}}$ emission was measured with a standard deviation of $127\,e^{-}$ of ENC by using the analog pulse output, and with $276\,e^{-}$ of ENC by using the ToT digital output. The resolution in ToT mode is dominated by the pixel-to-pixel variation.