Design considerations of CMOS VLSI for KEK B-factory silicon microvertex detector

Design studies on a front-end CMOS amplifier for a silicon strip detector of the KEK B-factory experiment are described in terms of circuit characterization, and prototype fabrication and evaluation. Extrapolating the prototype performance to the B-factory design, the authors estimated the equivalent noise charge of 1000 electrons at 20 pF with an nMOS input FET. A pipeline analog memory, a built-in gain stage, and a flip-chip assembly were key elements of the design.<>