Performance evaluation of low-noise analog front-end for semiconductor detectors

We report on the recent development of a low-noise analog front-end ASIC for hard X-ray and gamma-ray detectors. The ASIC aims for the readout of strip detectors utilizing silicon and cadmium telluride (CdTe) as detector materials. Each readout channel includes a charge-sensitive amplifier, band-pass filters and sample-and-hold circuit. It also includes a leakage current compensation circuit to accommodate to the variety of solid-state detectors. The equivalent noise level of a typical channel reached 88 e
^-
+ 8.1 e
^-
/pF (rms) for a power consumption of 3 mW per channel. We also evaluated the ASIC performances by combining with a CdTe line sensor.