Silicon-anode detector with integrated electronics for microchannel-plate imaging detectors

We describe a silicon anode with integrated electronics for use in photon-counting microchannel-plate (MCP) imaging detectors. Very-large-scale integrated techniques using a 2 μm complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) process allow a passive-anode region, which collects charge from the MCPs, to be surrounded by an active event-processing region. The anode region is made from a rectangular array of pads that are formed using the metal interconnect layers of the CMOS process. Individual pads are electrically connected to form isolated arrays of rows and columns; each row terminates at a well of one charge-coupled device (CCD) register, and each column terminates at a well of a second orthogonal CCD register. The distribution of charge within each register is used to encode the charge-cloud coordinates. A two-dimensional prototype anode was constructed with 128×80 pixels spaced at 50 μm intervals; the anode readout rate is 31 250 Hz. Subpixel centroiding techniques can be employed to reduce the number of pixels that must be read for a given resolution. We envision a rugged, compact, low-power, and low-mass single-substrate imaging anode with a direct (x,y) digital interface. The design offers large array formats with inherent pixel linearity, orthogonality, and stability. An identified upgrade path promises orders-of-magnitude increases in speed (up to 10 6 photons s −1 ) and dynamic range, while maintaining large pixel count (>4000×4000) and MCP pore-limited resolution (