Gigasensors for an Attoscope: Catching Quanta in CMOS

Around 1987, Eric Vittoz studied the basic parameters for the development of ´pixel´ particle tracking detectors in collaboration with a team in Geneva at CERN. CERN scientist Erik Heijne traces the evolution of these particle imagers, which has resulted in matrices of 256x256 pixels with > 1000 transistors per pixel that can process single quanta and have connections with neighboring cells allowing analog and logic operations at ns time-scale for distributed events.