Development of CoRDIA: An Imaging Detector for Next-Generation Synchrotron Rings and Free Electron Lasers

The current or planned upgrades of most radiation sources – for synchrotron rings towards the diffraction limit, and for Free Electron Lasers towards faster continuous operation at a few 100 kHz, require a new generation of detectors to profit from this step.The acronym CoRDIA stands for Continuous Readout Digitising Imager Array, and is a hybrid pixel detector development targeted on these next-generation synchrotron sources and Free Electron Lasers. Serving the latter it builds upon the concept of the AGIPD detector, employing a charge sensitive preamplifier with adaptive gain switching. The further signal path comprises of a Correlated Double Sampling stage and an Analogue to Digital Converter (ADC) with 11 bit resolution, serving a sub array of 16 pixels. 128 ADCs connect to a multi-gigabit serial link to drive the images off chip. For this part CoRDIA adopts the implementation on the Timepix4 chip by Nikhef. An Application Specific Integrated Circuit with 128 x 128 pixels will implement 8 of the previously described blocks. Since the links conform to industry standards (IEEE 802.3ae), the subsequent data acquisition can be based on commercial components (e.g. Field Programmable Gate Array cards connected via multi-fibre optical links).Performance targets are a continuous frame rate of ≈150 kHz, and singe-photon sensitivity at ≪12 keV, and a dynamic range of >10 ⁴ photons (@ 12 keV) with a silicon sensor, which could be extended using active sensors or sensors from "high-Z" materials.