Speaker
Description
The precision to which the arrival time of 511 keV photons are able to be known directly affects the signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) for reconstructed images in time-of-flight positron emission tomography (TOF-PET). Currently, significant research is ongoing to push the full-width-half-maximum (FWHM) coincidence time resolution (CTR) for TOF-PET systems well below 100 ps towards the few-10’s-of-ps regime. In this work, we designed an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) in a commercial 65nm CMOS process to translate ultra-fast timing performance currently demonstrated in state-of-the-art bench-top measurements into a fully integrated scalable topology for large scale time-of-flight positron emission tomography (TOF- PET) systems. We targeted a scalable, low-noise, ultra-fast silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) analog front-end that maintains excellent SNR for single photon response while achieving ≤35 ps FWHM electronic noise jitter for single photon detection with 4x4 mm2 Broadcom AFBR-S4N44P014M Near-ultraviolet metal-trench SiPMs. This “analog” chip uses low-voltage differential signaling (LVDS) transmitters to drive discriminator data to an external time-to-digital converter (TDC). We present experimental evaluation of achievable single photon time resolution and CTR with the first prototype test chip.
| Track | FTMI |
|---|---|
| Presentation type | Oral |