• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.56 no.4
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• pp.1532-1537
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• 2024

Time-of-flight (TOF) PET detectors with fast-rise-time scintillators and fast-single photon time resolution silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) have been developed to improve the coincidence timing resolution (CTR) to sub-100 ps. The CTR can be further improved with an optimal bandwidth and minimized electronic noise in the readout circuit and this helps reduce the distortion of the fast signals generated from the TOF-PET detector. The purpose of this study was to develop an ultra-high frequency and fully-differential (UF-FD) readout circuit that minimizes distortion in the fast signals produced using TOF-PET detectors, and suppresses the impact of the electronic noise generated from the detector and front-end readout circuits. The proposed UF-FD readout circuit is composed of two differential amplifiers (time) and a current feedback operational amplifier (energy). The ultra-high frequency differential (7 GHz) amplifiers can reduce the common ground noise in the fully-differential mode and minimize the distortion in the fast signal. The CTR and energy resolution were measured to evaluate the performance of the UF-FD readout circuit. These results were compared with those obtained from a high-frequency and single ended readout circuit. The experiment results indicated that the UF-FD readout circuit proposed in this study could substantially improve the best achievable CTR of TOF-PET detectors.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.478-480
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• 2009

The design of a CMOS clamped-clamped beam resonator along with a full custom integrated differential amplifier, monolithically fabricated with a commercial 0.35 ${\mu}m$ CMOS technology, is presented. The implemented amplifier, which minimizes the negative effect of the parasitic capacitance, enhances the electrical MEMS characterization, obtaining a $48{\times}10^8$ resonant frequency-quality factor product ($Q{\times}f_{res}$) in air conditions, which is quite competitive in comparison with existing CMOS-MEMS resonators.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.221-224
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• 2012

We propose a Readout Integrated Circuit (ROIC), which applies a fixed current bias sensing method to the input stage in order to simplify the circuit structure and the infrared sensor characteristic control. For the sample-and-hold stage to display and control a signal detected by the infrared sensor using a two-dimensional (2D) focal plane array, a differential delta sampling (DDS) circuit is proposed, which effectively removes the FPN. In addition, the output characteristic is improved to have wider bandwidth and higher gain by applying a two-stage variable gain amplifier (VGA). The output characteristic of the proposed device was 23.91 mV/$^{\circ}C$, and the linearity error rate was less than 0.22%. After checking the performance of the ROIC using HSPICE simulation, the chip was manufactured and measured using the SMIC 0.35 um standard CMOS process to confirm that the simulation results from the actual design are in good agreement with the measurement results.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.251-257
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• 2015

This work presents modelling and simulation of a readout integrated circuit (ROIC) design considering pair-wise serial configuration along with thermal modeling of an uncooled microbolometer array. A fully differential approach is used at the input stage in order to reduce fixed pattern noise due to the process variation and self-heating-related issues. Each pair of microbolometers is pulse-biased such that they both fall under the same self-heating point along the self-heating trend line. A ${\pm}10%$ process variation is considered. The proposed design is simulated with a reference input image consisting of an array of $127{\times}92$ pixels. This configuration uses only one unity gain differential amplifier along with a single 14-bit analog-to-digital converter in order to minimize the dynamic range requirement of the ROIC.