The high speed, high dynamic range camera AGIPD

The European X-Ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL) will provide ultra short, highly coherent X-ray pulses which will revolutionize scientific experiments in a variety of disciplines spanning physics, chemistry, materials science, and biology. One of the differences between the European XFEL and other free electron laser sources is the high pulse frequency of 4.5 MHz. The European XFEL will provide pulse trains, consisting of up to 2700 pulses separated by 220 ns (600 μs in total) followed by an idle time of 99.4 ms, resulting in a supercycle of 10 Hz. Dedicated fast 2D detectors are being developed, one of which is the Adaptive Gain Integrating Pixel Detector (AGIPD). AGIPD is based on the hybrid pixel technology. The design goals of the recently produced, radiation hard Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) with dynamic gain switching amplifiers are (for each pixel) a dynamic range of more than 10⁴ 12.4 keV photons in the lowest gain, single photon sensitivity in the highest gain, an analog memory capable of storing 352 images, and operation at 4.5 MHz frame rate. A vetoing scheme allows to maximize the number of useful images that are acquired by providing the possibility to overwrite any previously recorded image during the pulse train. The AGIPD will feature a pixel size of (200 μm)² and a silicon sensor with a thickness of 500 μm. The image data is read out and digitized between pulse trains.