A: This paper is a review of recent progress of RD53 Collaboration. Results obtained on the study of the radiation effects on 65 nm CMOS have matured enough to define first strategies to adopt in the design of analog and digital circuits. Critical building blocks and analog very front end chains have been designed, tested before and after 5-800 Mrad. Small prototypes of 64 × 64 pixels with complex digital architectures have been produced, and point to address the main issues of dealing with extremely high pixel rates, while operating at very small in-time thresholds in the analog front end. The collaboration is now proceeding at full speed towards the design of a large scale prototype, called RD53A, in 65 nm CMOS technology.

In this work, we present a prototype of the Monolithic Active Pixel Sensor (MAPS) called X-CHIP-02 designed in 180 nm SOI CMOS technology. The selected technology has attractive features for fabrication of X-ray imaging sensors: 100 Ω⋅ cm handle wafer resistivity, thick epitaxial layer to suppress back-gate effect, support of high voltage devices and deep trench isolation. X-CHIP-02 has two pixel matrices with the pixel pitch of 50 μm and 100 μm with integrated 8-bit photon counting circuitry. Fine pitch SOI monolithic pixels imply small capacitance and thus small electronic noise of ≈50 e−. Design of the sensor chip and basic radiation imaging capabilities are described in this paper.

We present the SpacePix-D, a battery-operated standalone pixel detector with built-in LCD for real-time visualization of particle hits and Bluetooth for wireless access. The SpacePix-D allows the possibility of local and remote operation and it serves as a demonstrator for the new 180 nm SoI monolithic 64 × 64 pixel detection ASICs with hit counting and deposited energy measurement capability. Currently, it operates with the X-chip03 detection ASIC which can be upgraded to a new class of SpacePix pixel detectors. The SpacePix ASIC has been submitted for manufacturing and it was designed for charged particle sensing in the space environment. It features a logarithmic front-end amplifier response to cover a large required dynamic range for heavy ion detection and SEU-hardened digital circuits.

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