READING DEVICE AND METHOD FOR MEASURING ENERGY AND FLIGHT TIME USING SILICON PHOTOMULTIPLIERS

This invention is about a readout apparatus and method for time-of-flight and energy measurements with silicon photomultipliers (SIPM) coupled to a scintillator. The timing measurement can be as accurate as 50 ps or below, after calibration. The energy is measured using a time-over-threshold technique, and the energy resolution is only constrained by the scintillation statistics. In order to achieve low power of 10 mW per channel, a low impedance input amplifier and analogue time-to-digital converters (TDCs) based on time interpolation are used. The readout circuit can be triggered by a single photoelectron (p.e.) with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) above 20 dB. The said readout circuit operates with S.iPMs of different gain, polarity and matrix size. The preferred embodiment of the readout apparatus is a multi-channel application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) with 64 channels.