Event-Driven Detectors For Soft X-Ray Astronomy

We discuss the joint development by Penn State University (PSU) and Teledyne Imaging Systems (TIS) of hybrid CMOS detectors for X-ray astronomy, and specifically the development over the past 10 years of a new event-driven X-ray detector for future astronomy missions. This novel X-ray detector is designed to perform on-chip event recognition and to read out only pixels containing X-ray events. With the exception of analog power supply voltages, the detector is digital in/digital out, reducing off-chip electronics to a minimum. It operates at frame rates of over 1000 frames per second, providing excellent performance for bright X-ray sources and/or high-throughput optics. The pixel size is 40 x 40 microns, and we are fabricating devices with 550 x 550 pixels.