NALU SCIENTIFIC, LLC — Department of Energy SBIR Phase II: 27a

Description

The detection of individual charged particles, photons and neutrons, and estimation of their identity, point of production, energy, momentum, and time of arrival is the basis for a wide range of scientific and commercial applications from high energy, nuclear and astrophysics to medical imaging and diagnosis. We are targeting the data acquisition market for medium-to-large size scientific experiments in high energy physics, nuclear physics, and astrophysics. These complex experiments require fast data acquisition and signal processing, very long data buffers and resilience to the hostile radiation environments. Rapid processing enables timing resolutions of a few picoseconds, facilitating accurate, high-precision measurements of particle properties. These requirements mandate the design and development of custom electronic equipment to highly integrate functionality and performance and drive down the cost per channel. Next-generation HEP experiments will require accuracy at or below 5 ps, resilience to possibly extreme radiation environments, and very long buffering capability. We propose to design, fabricate,andmake commercially available the “AARDVARC”: a highly integrated, high-density System-on-a-Chip capable of state-of-the-art waveform sampling, self-calibration, integrated readout, signal processing, and feature extraction capabilities. The AARDVARC device will also have self-test, calibration, and monitoring circuitry in addition to a deep sampling buffer making it suitable for large High Energy and Nuclear Physics experiments with potentially long trigger delays. Design, development, and fabrication of the first three revisions of AARDVARC System-on-a-chip waveform digitizer in 130 nm technology. In this Phase IIA application, we propose to test AARDVARC V3 and test, design, and fabricate two more revisions (V4, V5) of the AARDVARC chip. New revisions will incorporate radiation hardening techniques, better performance, complete digital back-end with feature extraction. User friendly firmware and software will be developed. This device can be used by scientists in high energy and nuclear physics experiments for fast analog data acquisition and digitization. It has applications in general-purpose instrumentations and medical/PET imaging, possibly bundled with sensing devices (e.g. SiPMs, PMTs). We anticipate being able to sell the device as an OEM, provide associated design services and support, and/or license it to a larger device manufacturer. The low unit cost and low-power nature of the design will give us a competitive edge.