Design and prototype performance of the ATLAS pixel detector

The ATLAS experiment at the LHC will have three barrel and two times five disk layers of silicon pixel detectors as the innermost elements of the Inner Tracking Detector. The detector is built adopting the hybrid pixel technology in which 16 highly performant FE-chips are connected to a silicon sensor by means of the bump and flip-chip technique. Owing to the high bunch crossing rate of 40 MHz at the LHC and the high particle fluences a sophisticated design concept is employed. The project is presently entering the pre-production phase. The various aspects of the design of the detector, the expected performance and the so far obtained prototype results are presented.