A CMOS fully compensated continuous reset system

As a result of a cooperation between Brookhaven National Laboratory and eV Products a generation of high performance readout ASICs was developed. One of the novel circuit solutions implemented in the ASICs is a fully compensated continuous reset system capable of handling detector leakage currents up to several tens of nA with high linearity and with noise contribution always lower than the shot noise contribution of the detector. The reset is based on the use of a MOSFET operating above threshold and in saturation. The full compensation is obtained by using a suitable replica of the reset MOSFET. The experimental results are reported. Evaluation and measurement of the noise contribution and of the dependence of the gain on the leakage current are also discussed.