A high dynamic range and low power 16-channel CMOS circuit for particle detection in space plasmas

A low power 16-channel ASIC has been designed in the standard 0.35m CMOS technology. It includes a Charge-Sensitive-Amplifier (CSA) and a discriminator from noise. It is designed using hard-rad layout rules and can be used as the front-end electronics of a 3D imaging space plasma analyser that includes charged particles multipliers (Micro Channel Plates). With a total power consumption limited to 600W per channel, the detection chain achieves a gain of 1mV/fC over a wide dynamic range of input charges varying from 4fC to 4pC. The CSA Pulse-Pair-Resolution (PPR) is 250ns providing the ability to reach a minimum particle count rate of 4MHz periodic per channel. By adjusting the threshold of discrimination from noise to the limited dynamic range of standard MCP, it is suggested that particle count rates as high as 10MHz periodic can be achieved with this low power ASIC while classical hybrid space qualified components with a similar count rate capability have a power consumption of 25mW per channel.