Nikhef's involvement in Medipix

From the start of the Medipix collaborations at CERN, Nikhef has been involved. The goal of the collaboration is to transfer the technology, developed for semiconductor pixel detectors within High-Energy Physics, towards other applications such as Medical and Analytical X-ray imaging.

The main idea behind the Medipix chips is to make a hybrid system of a detection material, initially a semiconductor and currently also gas, and a CMOS ASIC aimed at photon counting with no electronic noise, enabling high dynamic range imaging. In the figure an example is given of such a hybrid system.

The NIKHEF group is involved mainly in development of the read out interfaces for the Medipix2 chip family, the MXR and Timepix chips (Muros) as well as in chip carrier boards design.

The Relaxd project combines these two topic and should result in a large-area high-speed X-ray video-camera capable of 150 frames per second for the Medipix2 family of chips and 1000 frames per second for the Medipix3 chip.