The AGIPD 1.0 ASIC: Random access high frame rate, high dynamic range X-ray camera readout for the European XFEL

The European XFEL is an extremely brilliant Free Electron Laser Source with a very demanding pulse structure: trains of 2700 X-Ray pulses are repeated at 10 Hz. The pulses inside the train are spaced by 220 ns and each one contains up to 10
¹²
photons of 12.4 keV, while being ≤ 100 fs in length. AGIPD (Adaptive Gain Integrating Pixel Detector) is a hybrid 1M-pixel detector developed by DESY, PSI, and the Universities of Bonn and Hamburg to cope with these properties. Thus the readout ASIC has to provide not only single photon sensitivity and a dynamic range ≳ 10
⁴
photons/pixel in the same image but also a memory for as many images of a pulse train as possible for delayed readout prior to the next train. The AGIPD 1.0 ASIC uses a 130 nm CMOS technology and radiation tolerant techniques to withstand the radiation damage incurred by the high impinging photon flux. Each ASIC contains 64 × 64 pixels of 200μmχ200μm. The circuit of each pixel contains a charge sensitive preamplifier with threefold switchable gain, a discriminator for an adaptive gain selection, and a correlated double sampling (CDS) stage to remove reset and low-frequency noise components. The output of the CDS, as well as the dynamically selected gain is sampled in a capacitor-based analogue memory for 352 samples, which occupies about 80% of a pixels area. For readout each pixel features a charge sensitive buffer. A control circuit with a command based interface provides random access to the memory and controls the row-wise readout of the data via multiplexers to four differential analogue ports. The AGIPD 1.0 full scale ASIC has been received back from the foundry in fall of 2013. Since then it has been extensively characterised also with a sensor as a single chip and in 2 × 8-chip modules for the AGIPD 1 Mpix detector. We present the design of the AGIPD 1.0 ASIC along with supporting results, also from beam tests at PETRA III and APS, and show changes incorporated in the recently taped out AGIPD 1.1 ASIC upgrade.