Spectrometric performances of CdTe and CdZnTe semiconductor detector arrays at high X-ray flux

The development of a novel energy resolved fast X-ray imaging detector is reported. The device is based on pixellated cadmium telluride (CdTe) and cadmium zinc telluride (CdZnTe) detectors coupled to a custom designed 16-channel fast spectroscopy front-end electronic circuit. For each channel, a fast Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) continuously digitizes the signal from the detector pixel. A FPGA controls the acquisition and constructs the spectra on 256 energy bins for each channel. In this study, we measured the spectrometric performances with monochromatic X-rays from a synchrotron source at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF). We were able to acquire high-resolution pulse spectra for different X-ray energies and fluxes ranging from 10⁵ to 2 10⁷ photons.mm^-2.s^-1. An energy resolution of 15% at 50 keV (7.5 keV FWHM) was obtained at 10⁷ photons.mm^-2.s^-1. Additionally, first X-ray images in counting mode obtained with a 16-channels linear detector module are shown.