A Single Chip Computational Sensor System for Neutron Detection Applications

This paper presents the design and test results of a standalone computational radiation sensor system based on a single chip solution. A low-power sensor front end with a charge sensitive amplifier and an event driven analog-to-digital converter is integrated on the same chip as a dedicated microcontroller to process and bin the data from the neutron detector diode heterojunction according to pulse height. This combination effectively implements a single chip multichannel analyzer with the capability to do further processing of the data in software. The design was fabricated in a 0.18 μm CMOS technology with field tests demonstrating the validity of the approaches taken. The total system power consumption is 24 μW.