Accelerated development of a general purpose active-pixel CMOS sensor

Accelerated development of a general purpose active-pixel CMOS sensor: We developed an active pixel CMOS sensor and pixel array readout circuitry suitable for high energy particle detection, direct topmetal charge collection, and potential other applications. We targeted the recently open sourced Skywater 130nm process and exclusively used open source tooling which means our design is unencumbered by NDAs and licensing restrictions. During development we produced several tools to help expedite the analog design process, and scripted a large portion of the system integration. The reduction in complexity brought by the simplified flow allowed the design to be completed by only 2 people in a span of around 3 months.