All-in-One Detectors for Space Application: the Versatile and Compact ArduSiPM Technology

The ArduSiPM technology joins the system's innovation on a chip (SoC) and the simultaneous improvement of Silicon photomultiplier detectors in a new generation of all-in-one scintillation detectors conceived from INFN Rome1 in 2014.The basic idea is to minimize COTS components (typically fast analog) and develop a large part of the peripherals inside the SoC, thus obtaining compact electronics without using ASICs and an external data acquisition system. The result was a detector that can measure the rate, the arrival time (with around tens of nanoseconds of resolution), and the number of photons arriving on the SiPM. Naked or coupled with suitable scintillators, it can be used in several applications, such as radiation monitors or sensitive light detectors. This approach is independent of the specific hardware and gets better with the growth trend of SoC and SiPM technologies.The INFN MICRO experiment explores different circuits and engineering solutions to develop detectors based on this technology in various application fields such as study of Transient Luminous Events in the high atmosphere, measure the bioluminescence in analytical chemistry, particles and high sensitivity light detector for nanosatellite and picosatellite. The goal is to integrate our detector into the satellite's onboard computer, making it one of the system's peripherals in the same way as the actuators, the navigation instruments, and the attitude control.