A Low Power Monolithic Active Pixel Sensor Prototype for the STCF Inner Tracker

TL;DR

This paper presents a low power monolithic active pixel sensor prototype designed for the inner tracker of the STCF, emphasizing reduced power consumption, high speed, and integration of timing functionalities, fabricated in 180 nm CMOS technology.

Contribution

It introduces a novel low power MAPS prototype with large sensor size, integrated timing readout, and optimized circuitry for the STCF inner tracker application.

Findings

Power consumption estimated at 55.7 mW/cm2 from simulations

Prototype chips successfully fabricated and preliminarily tested

Sensor design achieves high readout speed and timing accuracy

Abstract

The Super Tau-Charm Facility (STCF) is a proposed $e^+e^-$ collider with a peak luminosity 100 times higher than that of the present tau-charm factory. The inner tracker (ITK) of STCF should feature a low material budget and high readout speed. Under these requirements, the monolithic active pixel sensor (MAPS) is considered as a promising candidate for the ITK. To minimize the power consumption of MAPS (for low material budget), larger-size sensors are proposed to reduce the scale of the readout circuitry while preserving the required position resolution. Multiple sensors with varying dimensions and structures were designed and integrated in several prototype chips for performance comparison, fabricated in a 180~nm CIS process. The in-pixel readout circuit can also provide time of arrival (ToA) and time-over-threshold (ToT) of the hit signal, with a least significant bit (LSB) of 50 ns. The peripheral readout circuit performs operations including timestamp correction, data aggregation, caching, framing, 8b/10b encoding, and serialization. According to simulation, the power consumption for a full-scale chip is about 55.7 mW/cm2. Preliminary measurements have been conducted on the prototype chips.