FRONTier RADiography is an R&D project to assess the feasibility of digital
mammography with Synchrotron Radiation at the ELETTRA Light Source in Trie
ste. In order to reach an acceptable time duration of the exam, a fast-and
low-noise photon counting ASIC has been developed in collaboration with Aur
elia Microelettronica, called Frontrad ReadOut SysTem. It is a multichannel
counting system, each channel being made of a low-noise charge-sensitive p
reamplifier optimized for X-lay energy range (10 100 keV), a CR-RC2 shaper.
a discriminator and a 16-bit counter. In older to set the discriminator th
reshold, a set of a global 6-bit DAC and a local (per channel) 3-bit DAC ha
s been implemented within the ASIC. We report on the measurements done with
the 8-channel prototype chip and the comparison with the simulation result
s. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.