New miniaturized camera from ADVACAM
The effort of several last months resulted in our new small family member MiniPIX TPX3. It is a palmtop 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 a simplified, miniaturized, networkable, and cheaper 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 the ARM processor and FPGA takes care of measurement, communication, and data acquisition. Gradually we will add more and more functionality – the ultimate plan is to run it in a standalone mode having several/many of these units networked and operated synchronously. Now it has to stay connected to the PC via a 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 applications 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 planned.
Currently, the first batch of final devices is going through our production where they will get the final metallic box. We will start offering these detectors very soon (with good discounts for schools).
Update 26-May:
The device is tested even with a 2 mm CdTe sensor now. With such a sensor, it can be used as a Compton gamma camera without collimators as described in a separate article. It is available for orders at Hawkeye Spectral Imaging
