The effort of several last months resulted in our new small family member MiniPIX TPX3. It is a USB stick size photon counting radiation imager or particle tracker. For each ionizing particle (e.g X-ray photon) it digitally registers its position, energy, time of arrival and track shape – basically everything you can want. It can be used as a standard X-ray camera as well (just a bit more advanced). It is beautiful even inside:
The point was to create simplified, miniaturized, networkable and cheeper version of our successful AdvaPIX TPX3 detector. The speed of this baby is about 2 mega hits per second in spectral mode or about 20 frames per second in frame mode.
The device is really small – the very first prototype of this new device looked like this (two months ago):
Regardless of its small size, it is pretty powerful: The combination of ARM processor and FPGA takes care about measurement, communication and data acquisition. Gradually we will add more and more functionality – the ultimate plan is to run it in standalone mode having several/many of these units networked and operated synchronously. Now it has to stay connected to PC via micro USB cable.
It supports all major sensor types of ADVACAM: Silicon 100, 300, 500 and 1000 microns, CdTe 1 mm (2 mm should work as well). The minimal energy threshold is about 2 keV, spatial resolution 55 microns, time resolution 1.5 ns.
There are many application of this small device: standard X-ray imaging, spectral X-ray imaging (XRF, XRD, SAXS, WAXS), gamma camera, compton camera, radiation monitoring (recognizing particle types, energies, spectra), time-of-flight measurements…
The prototype batch of these devices was fully tested with Silicon (300, 500 and 1000 microns) and CdTe (1 mm) in multiple instances – everything works as planed.
Currently the first batch of final devices is going through our production where they will get the final metallic box. This detector will be available very soon, so stay tuned!
