Accelerated development of a general purpose active-pixel CMOS sensor for high-energy particle detection

We developed an active pixel CMOS sensor and pixel array readout circuitry suitable for high energy particle detection, direct topmetal charge collection, and potentially other applications that currently used commodity CMOS sensors not optimized for physics use. We targeted the recently open sourced Skywater 130nm process and exclusively used open source tooling during development which means our designs, simulations, and custom tools are unencumbered by NDAs and licensing restrictions. During development we produced several pieces of software to help expedite the analog design process and scripted a large portion of the system integration. Our tools allowed us to confidently reduce the complexity of the pixels embedded charge amplifier and were able to build a 6.5x8.5um pixel, less one tenth the area of CERN's ALPIDE sensor. The reduction in complexity brought by the simplified flow and pixel also allowed the design to be completed by only 2 people in a span of around 3 months.