Time-of-flight measurement is an important advancement in PET scanners to improve image reconstruction with a lower delivered radiation dose. This article describes the monolithic ASIC for the TT-PET project, a novel idea for a high-precision PET scanner for small animals. The chip uses a SiGe Bi-CMOS process for timing measurements, integrating a fully-depleted pixel matrix with a low-power BJT-based front-end per channel, integrated on the same 100 μm thick die. The target timing resolution is 30 ps RMS for electrons from the conversion of 511 keV photons. A novel synchronization scheme using a patent-pending TDC is used to allow the synchronization of 1.6 million channels across almost 2000 different chips at picosecond-level. A full-featured demonstrator chip with a 3x10 matrix of 500x500 μm2 pixels was produced to validate each block. Its design and experimental results are presented here.
@article{arxiv.1811.10246,
title = {A monolithic ASIC demonstrator for the Thin Time-of-Flight PET scanner},
author = {Pierpaolo Valerio and Roberto Cardarelli and Giuseppe Iacobucci and Lorenzo Paolozzi and Emanuele Ripiccini and Daiki Hayakawa and Salvatore Bruno and Alessandro Caltabiano and Mehmet Kaynak and Holger Rueker and Marzio Nessi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.10246},
year = {2019}
}