Design and Integration of a High Accuracy Multichannel Analog CMOS Peak Detect and Hold Circuit for APD-Based PET Imaging

This paper presents the design of a high accuracy multichannel peak detect and hold (PDH) circuit. This PDH measures the energy of an event and is one part of a readout chain for avalanche photo diodes (APD)-based positron emission tomography (PET) imaging. The circuit is designed in a 0.35μm CMOS process. The proposed PDH is dedicated to ultra low amplitude, large amplitude range from several tens millivolts to 1.1 V, and fast peaking time (190 ns) semi-Gaussian pulses. The two-phase technique has been used to cancel the major error source of the classical CMOS PDH: offset. A two-gain OTA is applied to minimize the DC error. A peak error less 1% for a small input signal (amplitude is between 40 mV and 300 mV) and a peak error less than 0.2% for a large input signal (amplitude is between 300 mV and 1.1 V) have been obtained from test. The area of a PDH is equal to about 200 μm × 40 μm. In our PDH system, the drop rate is negligible.