Analog and mixed-signal circuits for semiconductor detector microsystems

化合物半导体冶金学和微米级光刻技术的最新进展使像素化半导体辐射探测器的制造具有使高分辨率核成像可行的能力。智能传感器接口电子设备能够检测粒子能量和相互作用事件的三维位置，必须将半导体辐射检测器与数字世界连接起来。前端像素电子器件所需的功能性由于大量并行信号通道而加剧，每个并行信号通道与检测器的一个像素相关联。虽然像素数量目前达到几百个范围，但未来需要高分辨率成像的应用将需要在芯片上容纳数千个通道。

The latest advances in metallurgy of compound semiconductors and also in micron-scale photolithography enable fabrication of pixelated semiconductor radiation detectors with a capability to make the high-resolution nuclear imaging feasible. Intelligent sensor interface electronics, able to detect the particle energy and the 3-D position of the interaction event, must connect the semiconductor radiation detector with the digital world. The required functionality of front-end pixel electronics is exacerbated by a large number of the parallel signal channels, each one associated with one pixel of the detector. While the number of pixels currently reaches the range of a few hundred, future applications requiring high-resolution imaging will need to accommodate thousands of channels on chip.