A Gigabit per second read-out system for Medipix Quads

A system to read-out images from four photon-counting Medipix chips at one Gigabit per second has been constructed in a bilateral collaboration between Nikhef and PANalytical. The system consists of two printed circuit boards. One board supports the four Medipix readout ASICs, flip-chipped to a single pixellized semiconducting sensor on top. This board is mounted perpendicular on the Relaxd read-out board. This Relaxd board supplies the necessary voltages to the Medipix readout ASICs, controls all signals to and from these chips via a low-power Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA, Lattice SC series) and communicates with a PC through a standard one Gigabit per second Ethernet connection (GbE). The T-shaped mechanical topology allows multiple modules to be mounted adjacent to each other in all directions (2D tiling) and to minimise the insensitive area between separate Relaxd modules. An overview of the system layout and the functionality is presented as well as the first test results. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.