Active pixel sensors on high resistivity silicon and their readout

The concept of an X-ray active matrix pixel sensor (XAMPS) is introduced. XAMPSs are direct illumination, position sensitive X-ray detectors with about one million pixels. They count the number of diffracted X-rays in each pixel by measuring the total charge released by converted X-rays in the body of the sensor. Readout is accomplished with a relatively small number of channels equal to the square root of the number of pixels. The estimated readout time is about 1 ms. Noise of the readout electronics can be so low that practically no additional fluctuations in the number of incident X-rays per pixel are added and therefore the XAMPS performance is very close to that of an ideal detector for X-ray crystallography.