The ExcaliburRX detector is an X-ray photon counting detector designed in collaboration with the Science and Technologies Facilities Council, and based upon the hybrid pixel technology of the latest generation of the Medipix ASIC, Medipix3RX, developed by the CERN-led Medipix collaboration. The heart of the detector is the sensor module, which consists of a 500 um thick monolithic silicon sensor bonded to two rows of 8 MedipixRX chips.
Frame rates of 250Hz are achievable with the highly parallel readout architecture using Front End Modules, an FPGA-based readout card, each of which controls eight of the MedipixRX chips and streams the data via fibre link to a dedicated server computer configured as an EPICS IOC. The FEM firmware also provides a burst mode where a frame rate of 1kHz can be read into internal memory and later streamed to disk.
ExcaliburRX is currently available in two form factors - ExcaliburRX-3M and ExcaliburRX-1M, the first a vertical tiling of three sensor modules and the second one sensor module.
ExcaliburRX-3M has an active area of 115 mm x 110 mm with two gaps of 6.4 mm between the three vertically stacked modules. Each module provides 2048 x 512 pixels with a pitch of 55 um, leading to more than 1 million pixels per sensor module and thus more than three million pixels for the ExcaliburRX-3M and more than 1 million for the ExcaliburRX-1M.
Above can be seen some images from the construction of the ExcaliburRX-3M detector. In the panel to the left, the detector is shown with the cover removed. To the left of the image is the sensor module chamber, in the middle the FEMs and associated cooling and to the right the power cards and connections. In the panel to the right, the sensor modules are shown with the surround of the sensor module chamber removed.
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