A read-out system for the Medipix2 chip capable of 500 frames per second

High-speed X-ray-imaging acquisition technique is a growing field that can be used to understand microscopic mechanism of different phenomena in biology and material science. IFAE and CNM developed a very high-speed readout system, named DEMAS, for the Medipix2. The system is able to read a single Medipix2 chip through the parallel bus at a rate of 1 kHz. With a duty cycle of 50%, the real sampling speed is 500 frames per second (fps). This implies that 1 ms is allocated to the exposure time and another millisecond is devoted to the read-out of the chip. In such configuration, the raw data throughput is about 500 Mbit/s. For the first time we present examples of acquisition at 500 fps of moving samples with X-rays working in direct capture and photon counting mode. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.