Characterization of Medipix3 With Synchrotron Radiation

Medipix3 is the latest generation of photon counting readout chips of the Medipix family. With the same dimensions as Medipix2 (256 × 256 pixels of 55 μm × 55 μm pitch each), Medipix3 is however implemented in an 8-layer metallization 0.13 μm CMOS technology which leads to an increase in the functionality associated with each pixel over Medipix2. One of the new operational modes implemented in the front-end architecture is the Charge Summing Mode (CSM). This mode consists of a charge reconstruction and hit allocation algorithm which eliminates event-by-event the low energy counts produced by charge-shared events between adjacent pixels. The present work focuses on the study of the CSM mode and compares it to the Single Pixel Mode (SPM) which is the conventional readout method for these kind of detectors and it is also implemented in Medipix3. Tests of a Medipix3 chip bump-bonded to a 300 μm thick silicon photodiode sensor were performed at the Diamond Light Source synchrotron to evaluate the performance of the new Medipix chip. Studies showed that when Medipix3 is operated in CSM mode, it generates a single count per detected event and consequently the charge sharing effect between adjacent pixels is eliminated. However in CSM mode, it was also observed that an incorrect allocation of X-rays counts in the pixels occurred due to an unexpectedly high pixel-to-pixel threshold variation. The present experiment helped to better understand the CSM operating mode and to redesign the Medipix3 to overcome this pixel-to-pixel mismatch.