A Bulk Driven Transimpedance CMOS Amplifier for SiPM Based Detection

The contribution of this work lies in the development of a bulk driven operational
transconducctance amplifier which can be integrated with other analog circuits and
photodetectors in the same chip for compactness, miniaturization and reducing the
power. Silicon photomultipliers, also known as SiPMs, when coupled with scintillator materials are used in many imaging applications including nuclear detection. This thesis discuss the design of a bulk-driven transimpedance amplifier suitable for detectors where the front end is a SiPM. The amplifier was design and fabricated in a standard standard CMOS process and is suitable for integration with CMOS based SiPMs and commercially available SiPMs. Specifically, the amplifier was verified in simulations and experiment using circuit models for the SiPM. The bulk-driven amplifier’s performance, was compared to a commercially
available amplifier with approximately the same open loop gain (70dB). Both
amplifiers were verified with two different light sources, a scintillator and a SiPM.
The energy resolution using the bulk driven amplifier was 8.6% and was 14.2% for
the commercial amplifier indicating the suitability of the amplifier design for portable systems.