Portable system for imaging of α, β and X-ray sources with silicon pixel detectors and Medipix 1 read out

A portable system has been developed for the control and the readout of a 64×64 pixel silicon hybrid detector (1.1×1.1 cm² active area), bump-bonded to the Medipix1 readout chip. This system was originally designed for biomedial imaging applications and is based on standard commercial digital I/O boards and a compact dedicated interface (p-MUROS), connected to the portable PC. The Medipix1 chip is hosted in a 257 Pin Grid Array chip carrier directly placed on the p-MUROS board. This board is the simplified version of the MUROS1 readout board already developed in the framework of the Medipix collaboration. User-friendly software system (Medisoft 3.3) has been written to provide control of the system and image acquisition, display and processing. This complete hardware/software imaging system has been used with laboratory α, β and γ sources for test purposes and represents the portable version of a desktop imaging system developed for β-autoradiography. The system description and complete imaging tests are presented. Additional applications include the monitoring of the flux and the energy spectrum of X-rays tubes.