Development of a small-scale protope of the GOSSIPO-2 chip in 0.13 um CMOS technology

The GOSSIP (Gas On Slimmed Silicon Pixel) detector is a proposed alternative for silicon based pixel detectors. The Gossip Prototype (GOSSIPO) chip is being developed to serve as a prototype read-out chip for such a gas-filled detector. Thanks to the very low capacitance at the preamplifier input, the front-end of the chip demonstrates low-noise performance in combination with a fast peaking time and low analog power dissipation. Measurement of the drift time of every primary electron in the gas volume enables 3D reconstruction of the particle tracks. For this purpose a Time-to- Digital converter must be placed in each pixel. A small-scale prototype of the GOSSIP chip has been developed in the 0.13 μm CMOS technology. The prototype includes a 16 by 16 pixel array where each pixel is equipped with a front-end circuit, threshold DAC, and a 4-bit TDC. The chip is available for testing in May 2007 and after initial tests it will be postprocessed to build a prototype detector. This paper describes the detector design goals, the design of the chip and the first experimental results.