A low-power 10-bit multichannel analyzer chip for radiation detection

This paper presents the design and test results of a low-power 10-bit multichannel analyzer (MCA) chip for radiation detection. A low-power and event driven charge sensitive front-end and analog-to-digital converter (ADC) are implemented together with a microcontroller on a single chip. This level of integration leads to a compact MCA that can process and build pulse height spectra when interfaced with a range of scintillator detectors, with the ability to digitally process the spectra using software running as embedded code. The design was fabricated in a 0.13 μm CMOS technology and tested to validate the approaches taken. The measured power consumption of the MCA is below 85 μW while detecting multiple radioisotopes.