A novel silicon pixel sensor for beam monitoring applications at heavy-ion accelerators

This paper describes a silicon pixel sensor for non-interceptive real-time beam monitoring at heavy-ion accelerators. The total size of the sensor is 4 mm × 5 mm. It has 64 (row) × 120 (column) square pixels, each single of which is in the size of 40 μm × 40 μm. With the exposed sensing pad, this sensor can directly collect the charge in the media over the pixels. The in-pixel circuit mainly consists of a low-noise Charge Sensitive Amplifier (CSA) to establish the signal for the energy reconstruction and a discriminator with a Time-to-Amplitude Converter (TAC) for the Time of Arrival (TOA) measurement. The analog signal from each pixel is accessible through time-shared multiplexing over the entire pixel array. This paper will discuss the design of this IMPix-S1 sensor.