Design of the analog front-end for the Timepix3 and Smallpix hybrid pixel detectors in 130 nm CMOS technology

This paper describes a front-end for hybrid pixel readout chips, which was developed for the Timepix3 and Smallpix ASICs. The front-end contains a single-ended preamplifier with a structure for leakage current compensation which can handle both signal polarities, and a single-threshold discriminator with compensation for pixel-to-pixel mismatch. Preamplifier and discriminator are required to be fast, to allow a Time-Of-Arrival (TOA) measurement with a resolution of 1.56 ns. Time-Over-Threshold (TOT) is also measured; the monotonicity of TOT with respect to the input charge is greatly improved as compared to the previous Timepix chip. The analog area is only 55 μm × 13.5 μm. Timepix3 has already been fabricated and the first test results are also presented in this paper.