U.S. Dept. of Energy Awards Alphacore a Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I Contract to develop a versatile multi-channel readout integrated circuit for next generation nuclear physics experiments.
The award was posted on Feb 22, 2017, by the Department of Energy/Federal Locations.
Existing multi-channel readout integrated circuit (ROIC), based on inherently radiation-tolerant digital CMOS technologies, which are also commonly used in commercial electronics applications, suffer from high power consumption, vulnerability to radiation effects and prohibitive price.
A more practical design was sought for a low-power, low-cost, multi-channel, radiation-hard ROIC with higher resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) for numerous nuclear physics detector and sensor applications, including high energy physics experiments, space applications and defense applications.
Alphacore’s new monolithic multi-channel, low-noise preamplifier and shaper design, selected by the DoE for numerous nuclear physics experiments, will significantly improve ROIC detector performance for various precision sensors. Alphacore’s ROIC will feature efficient lower power design architecture with higher channel density and lower cost per channel than any current generation radiation hardened preamplifiers.
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Large Hadron Collider’s accelerator Altas Experiment. A series of accelerators work together to push particles to increasingly higher energies prior to detection. (Photo : Claudia Marcelloni/ CERN)
