A 24-Channel Digitizer With a JESD204B-Compliant Serial Interface for High-Speed Detectors

A 24-channel application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for the readout of high-speed CMOS active pixel sensors for charged particle detection is presented. The chip comprises 24 preamplifiers, 24 distinct 12-bit, 25 MSPS Pipelined analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) with self-calibration, an internal phase-locked loop (PLL), and a 3 Gbps serial interface that conforms to the JESD204B standard. To simplify interfacing with a variety of sensors, the ASIC also includes an automatic offset calibration loop. The high level of integration of the ASIC reduces overall system cost and area, and exploiting the signal characteristics of the image sensor allows the ADC to be optimized for reduced power dissipation. The use of an integrated serializer and an industry standard protocol simplifies integration of the ASIC into a complete camera system. The ASIC, called the High-Speed Image Preprocessor Targeted for Electron Readout, or HIPSTER, with a die area of 64.26 mm
²
, is packaged in a 480-ball grid array (BGA) and is fabricated in 180-nm CMOS technology. HIPSTER achieves typical differential nonlinearity (DNL) <; 0.55 LSB, input-referred thermal noise of 114.5 μV-rms, and a bit error rate (BER) of better than 10
^-14
. The power dissipation is 98 mW/channel.