Billion-pixel x-ray camera (BiPC-X)

Abstract

The continuing improvement in quantum efficiency (above 90% for single visible photons), reduction in noise (below 1 electron per pixel), and shrink in pixel pitch (less than 1 μm) enable billion-pixel x-ray cameras (BiPC-X) based on commercial complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) imaging sensors. We describe BiPC-X designs and prototype construction based on flexible tiling of commercial CMOS imaging sensors with millions of pixels. Device models are given for direct detection of low energy x rays (<10 keV) and indirect detection of higher energies using scintillators. Modified Birks’s law is proposed for light yield non-proportionality in scintillators as a function of x-ray energy. Single x-ray sensitivity and spatial resolution have been validated experimentally using a laboratory x-ray source and the Argonne Advanced Photon Source. Possible applications include wide field-of-view or large x-ray aperture measurements in high-temperature plasmas, the state-of-the-art synchrotron, x-ray free electron laser, and pulsed power facilities.

Perovskite nanocrystals stabilized in metal–organic frameworks for light emission devices

“…Metal halide perovskites are recent wonder materials for high-efficiency photovoltaics, [2][3][4][5][6][7] sensitive radiation sensors, [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] and low-cost LEDs [19][20][21][22][23][24][25] (Fig. 1).…”

“…Metal halide perovskites are recent wonder materials for high-efficiency photovoltaics, 2–7 sensitive radiation sensors, 8–18 and low-cost LEDs 19–25 (Fig. 1).…”

Ultrafast CMOS image sensors and data-enabled super-resolution for multimodal radiographic imaging and tomography

“…Three CMOS image sensors were taped out towards this goal, as shown in Figure 2. During the phase one of this research [4], theoretical modeling and preliminary tests demonstrated more than 10× quantum efficiency improvement for high-energy X-ray photons (>10 keV) by depositing a photon-attenuation-layer (PAL) on a CMOS image sensor [5,6]. In the phase two of this research, a block-wise compact readout architecture based on unit-length-capacitor and asynchronous successive-approximation (SAR) analog to digital converter (ADC) [7] was proposed and implemented, which enabled the image sensor fabricated using a standard 180-nm process to run at 76 thousand-frames-per-second (kfps).…”

Exploring machine learning to hardware implementations for large data rate x-ray instrumentation

“…After comparing HLS4ML and FINN using the mentioned models, and selecting the best one with the lowest latency, we now apply a similar process for two real high data-rate instrumentation applications: the CookieBox and the billion-pixel camera [6,57]. The objective of this experiment is to determine whether the performance of tool-flows is sufficient for these applications.…”