VIPIC IC - Design and Test Aspects of the 3D Pixel Chip

We report on the design of the VIPIC IC (Vertically Integrated Pixel Imaging Chip) designed for X-ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy (XPCS) experiments by FNAL in collaboration with AGH-UST. The VIPIC chip is a prototype matrix with 64 x 64 pixels with 80 mu m x 80 mu m pixel size and consists of two layers: analog and digital. The single analog pixel cell consists of a charge sensitive amplifier, a shaper, a single current discriminator and trim DACs. The simulated gain is 52 mu V/e(-), the noise ENC < 150 e(-) rms (with C-det = 100 fF) and the peaking time t(p) < 250 ns. The power consumption is 25 mu W/pixel in the analog part. The digital layer of the VIPIC integrated circuit is divided into 16 readout groups of pixels read out in parallel via separate serial ports with nominal frequency of the 100 MHz clock using the LVDS standard. The readout within each group is zero-suppressed. The sparsification scheme (addresses of hit pixels only) allows a dead-time free readout.