Investigation of Radiation-Induced Effects in a Front-end ASIC Designed for Photon Counting Sensor Systems

Abstract

This work outlines the measurements done to evaluate the second SPACIROC generation in ionizing radiation environments, i.e., particle beams: ions, protons, and X-rays. The SPACIROCs are front-end ASICs designed for the readout requirements of photomultiplier technologies like: SiPMs, MaPMTs. Several radiation-induced effects were observed but they proved to be benign application-wise. The threshold LET for SEUs was measured and two cross-sections for different LETs are provided. At extremely high dose rates (~100 rad/s) and TID above 50 krad proton/X-ray induced TID effects were observed, however a room-temperature annealing process was determined to mitigate the harmful TID effects in 24 hours