Excalibur: A three million pixels photon counting area detector for coherent diffraction imaging based on the Medipix3 ASIC

A three million pixels photon counting area detector for the coherent diffraction imaging beam line (113) of Diamond Light Source has been developed by a joint team of Diamond and STFC staff. The detector is the state of the art of X-ray detection technology since it exploits the latest generation of Medipix ASICs family that introduced a number of innovations. The specifications required by the beam line represented a severe challenge to all of the components of the detector. The frame rate of Excalibur is up to 1,000 frames per second when stored in local RAM or up to 100 frames per second when streamed to storage. Tests with an X-ray set show the imaging capabilities of the detector as well as the data acquisition speed.