Design and test of data acquisition systems for the Medipix2 chip based on PC standard interfaces

FANTI, VIVIANA;Marzeddu R;Piredda G;RANDACCIO, PAOLO

2005-01-01

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Abstract

We describe two readout systems for hybrid detectors using the Medipix2 single photon counting chip, developed within the Medipix Collaboration. The Medipix2 chip (256 x 256 pixels, 55 mu m pitch) has an active area of about 2 cm(2) and is bump-bonded to a pixel semiconductor array of silicon or other semiconductor material. The readout systems we are developing are based on two widespread standard PC interfaces: parallel port and USB (Universal Serial Bus) version 1.1. The parallel port is the simplest PC interface even if slow and the USB is a serial bus interface present nowadays on all PCs and offering good performances. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.