A Medipix3 readout system based on the National Instruments FlexRIO card and using the LabVIEW programming environment

Hybrid silicon photon-counting detectors are becoming standard equipment for many synchrotron applications. The latest in the Medipix family of read-out chips designed as part of the Medipix Collaboration at CERN is the Medipix3 [1], which while maintaining the same pixel size as its predecessor, offers increased functionality and operating modes. The active area of the Medipix3 chip is approx 14mm x 14mm (containing 256 X 256 pixels) which is not large enough for many detector applications, this results in the need to tile many sensors and chips. As a first step on the road to develop such a detector, it was decided to build a prototype single chip readout system to gain the necessary experience in operating a Medipix3 chip. To provide a flexible learning and development tool it was decided to build an interface based on the recently released FlexRIO (TM) system from National Instruments and to use the LabVIEW (TM) graphical programming environment. This system and the achieved performance are described in this paper.