Abstract:
In the context of radiation monitoring for occupational safety, personal dosimeters require highly sensitive and energy-efficient electronic interfaces. This work presented a low-power consumption and low-noise CMOS integrated circuit specifically tailored for personal dosimeters incorporating boron nitride (BN) neutron detectors. As a fourth-generation wide band gap semiconductor, the BN detector exhibited exceptionally low room-temperature leakage current (below 1 pA), enabling reliable operation without cryogenic cooling. Its unique feature of directly converting incident neutron signals into charge signals via the
10B(n,α)
7Li reaction eliminated the need for an additional conversion layer, streamlining the detection chain. The front-end ASIC architecture was comprised by four critical modules: a low-noise charge-sensitive preamplifier (CSA), a CR-RC shaping filter, a precision reference current source, and a hysteresis voltage discriminator. The CSA employed gain bootstrapping structure with a NMOS input, where the gate-source voltage of the input transistor is dynamically stabilized to enhance noise performance. This configuration achieves a transimpedance gain of 5 mV/fC while maintaining a low input-referred noise floor. A key innovation lies in the dynamically adjustable feedback resistor network, which addresses baseline drift induced by detector leakage. The structure integrates a differential pair (M1-M8) with a current mirror biasing mechanism and a low-pass filter (
RC=10 μs), creating a feedback loop that continuously compensates for slow leakage currents. This adaptive design ensures the circuit remains linear across a wide range of radiation fluxes (10² to 10
6 h
−1), with an integral nonlinearity (INL) of <1%. Fabricated in SMIC 55 nm CMOS technology, the circuit operates at a 1.2 V supply voltage, achieving a single-channel power consumption of 0.22 mW (186 μA current draw). Post-layout simulations demonstrate an equivalent noise charge (ENC) of 3e
− at zero detector capacitance, degrading to 1.21e
−/pF with increasing capacitance, making it suitable for detectors with up to 10 pF capacitance. The shaping filter’s 5 μs peaking time optimizes the signal-to-noise ratio for typical neutron-induced charge pulses (rise time is about 1 μs), ensuring reliable pulse counting in noisy environments. This design exemplifies the integration of advanced semiconductor technology with nuclear detection principles, offering a compact, low-power solution for next-generation personal dosimetry systems. The dynamically adaptive feedback mechanism sets a new benchmark for front-end stability in radiation detection applications, particularly for portable devices requiring long-term operation on battery power.