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

Description

The detection of individual charged particles, photons and neutrons and estimation of their properties, momentum and direction of arrival is the basis for a wide range of scientific and commercial applications from high-energy, nuclear and astro- physics 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 recording channels capable of fast data acquisition and signal processing. Furthermore, they need very long data buffers and resilience to hostile radiation environment. The rapid processing allows timing resolutions in the order of few picosecond which will translate to highly accurate estimation of charged particles and their tracks. This mandates design and development of custom electronic equipment to highly integrate functionality and performance and bring the cost per channel down. Especially, next generation HEP experiments require accuracy at or below 5 ps, resilience to radiation and very long buffering capability. We propose to design and make commercially available the “AARDVARC”: an highly integrated, high density System-on Chip (SoC) capable of state of the art waveform sampling, self-calibration, integrated readout and signal processing 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 Physics experiments with potentially long trigger delays. Design and development of the advanced AARDVARC chip based on the existing IRSx chip by integrating into one SoC (i) an optimized version of IRSx migrated into more recent technology, (ii) autonomous control, digital readout and signal processing capabilities (triggering, sparsification and data reduction), (iii) self-calibration and (iv) standard interfacing. The outcome will be a working prototype and a full design ready for submission to a semiconductor fab house for fabrication. This device can be used by scientists in high energy and nuclear physics experiments for fast analog data acquisition. Also, it has applications in general purpose instrumentations and medical/PET imaging, possibly bundled with sensing devices (photomultipliers). We anticipate to be able to sell the device as an OEM manufacturer, provide associated design services or license it to a larger device manufacturer due to the low cost and low power nature of the design which will give us a competitive edge.