Design and characterisation of a highly miniaturised radiation monitor HMRM

Reliable data on the ionising radiation environment is regarded as very important to ensure an efficient design and operation of spacecraft. Here we present a novel Highly Miniaturised Radiation Monitor (HMRM) that aims to greatly reduce costs and complexity of radiation detectors. core of the current design is a CMOS Image Sensor. Size and mass are considerably reduced thanks to this approach and there is also scope for a reduction in power consumption. This makes the HMRM much easier to integrate on a spacecraft. The innovative architecture of the proposed radiation monitor will also make particle identification possible. age sensor is based on a 50 by 51 pixel array. The selected pixel is a 4T, to reduce the noise. The array is read out in snapshot mode at a frame-rate of 10,000 fps. g currents and voltages are generated on-chip to reduce the number of signals required to control the sensor. The sensor is designed to work on a large range of temperatures, from −40 °C to +80 °C; hence a temperature sensor has been integrated. gital output data is obtained with a three-bit column parallel ADC with programmable thresholds. An analogue readout has been also designed to characterise and debug the ASIC. s following paper we also want to present the results obtained from the measurements on the prototype. Preliminary PTC plots show a gain of 60 µV/e− with CDS and a noise of 17 e− rms, which includes the noise from the external board.