A high frame rate, 16 million pixels, radiation hard CMOS sensor

CMOS sensors provide the possibility of designing detectors for a large variety of applications with all the benefits and flexibility of the widely used CMOS process. In this paper we describe a novel CMOS sensor designed for transmission electron microscopy. The overall design consists of a large 61 × 63 mm2 silicon area containing 16 million pixels arranged in a 4K × 4K array, with radiation hard geometry. All this is combined with a very fast readout, the possibility of region of interest (ROI) readout, pixel binning with consequent frame rate increase and a dynamic range close to 12 bits. The high frame rate has been achieved using 32 parallel analogue outputs each one operating at up to 20 MHz. Binning of pixels can be controlled externally and the flexibility of the design allows several possibilities, such as 2 × 2 or 4 × 4 binning. Other binning configurations where the number of rows and the number of columns are not equal, such as 2 × 1 or 2 × 4, are also possible. Having control of the CMOS design allowed us to optimise the pixel design, in particular with regard to its radiation hardness, and to make optimum choices in the design of other regions of the final sensor. An early prototype was also designed with a variety of geometries in order to optimise the readout structure and these are presented. The sensor was manufactured in a 0.35 μm standard CMOS process.