Photon counting hybrid pixel detector for X-ray imaging

We have designed and built prototype modules of a large area photon counting hybrid pixel detector. The detector consists of modules each with seven Aladin readout chips solder bump bonded to a silicon pixel detector. Each Aladin chip has 64 x 64 pixels together with logic to readout the whole array in 400 mus. It is intended to tile an area of 2000 x 2000 pixels, each of 150 mum x 150 mum and capable of up to 1 MHz count rate per pixel. This paper describes the design and operation of the detector and the performance of the existing modules. The measurements demonstrate that the detector can image 19 keV photons at 200 kHz photons per pixel with 3 keV FWHM noise. The detector is intended for X-ray diffraction studies with data capture speeds up to 1000 images per second, independent of the image size. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.