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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NUCLEAR SCIENCE, VOL. 57, NO. 2, APRIL 2010

Automatic Offset Cancellation and Time-Constant Reduction in Charge-Sensitive Preampliers

Alberto Pullia and Francesca Zocca
AbstractA circuit technique is presented which eliminates the offset at the output of charge-sensitive preampliers and optionally reduces the resistive reset time-constant. Offset cancellation as well as time-constant reduction are obtained with no trimming. Offset cancellation is obtained actively through a negative feedback path whose error variable is the offset itself. As a result the output voltage offset is automatically eliminated, irrespective of the bias point of the input transistor and the dark current of the sensor connected to the preamplier. Using the proposed technique in low-noise charge preampliers for germanium detectors typical offsets in the range 100300 mV are reduced to 2 mV. The noise of the preamplier is unaffected by the offset cancellation circuit. Moreover, by insertion of an optional resistor in the proposed circuitry the decay time-constant of the preamplier is automatically reduced by a factor of up to 10, while leaving unchanged the noise and the sensitivity of the charge preamplier. This improves pulse separation at the preampliers output, which can be particularly useful for pattern recognition at high event rates. The realized offset-free circuit features an equivalent noise of 650 eV fwhm in germanium at 3 s shaping time, i.e. an Equivalent Noise Charge of 94 electrons r.m.s. and a dynamic range in excess of 86 dB, which makes it perfectly suited for high-resolution gamma-ray spectrometry with large germanium detectors. Index TermsCharge preamplier, low noise preamplier, offset, semiconductor detector.

Fig. 1. Standard charge amplier. Block T.A. is a non-inverting high-gain Transimpedance Amplier.

I. INTRODUCTION

OW-NOISE continuous-reset charge ampliers for semiconductor radiation detectors or capacitive-impedance sensors are often affected by a large and unpredictable offset error in their output voltage. Such offset is typically in the 500 mV to 100 mV if the input device is a Junction Field-Effect Transistor (JFET), but it can easily exceed 1 V using a Metal-Oxide Field Effect Transistor (MOSFET). As can be deduced from Fig. 1, such a large offset is dictated mainly by at the gate of the input FET, which the negative bias voltage .A propagates to the output through the feedback resistor further offset source is the dark current of the sensor, which in accordance with the Ohms causes a voltage drop across law. Superimposing these two effects the offset is

(1)
Manuscript received July 23, 2009; revised October 01, 2009 and November 06, 2009. Current version published April 14, 2010. The title of this paper is patent pending, #TO2007A222838. The authors are with the Department of Physics and Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, University of Milan, 20133 Milano, Italy (e-mail: alberto.pullia@mi.infn.it; francesca.zocca@mi.infn.it). Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TNS.2009.2038913

where is the overall output offset and is the dark current of the sensor. A large and unpredictable output offset is an issue in most cases. If the preamplier is connected to a terminated coaxial cable, for example, it causes a signicant and useless static power consumption due to the DC current owing through the termination resistance. Moreover, if the preamplier signal is directly digitised it can reduce signicantly the available signal dynamic range. Sometimes in multi-channel systems the DC output voltage of the preampliers is trimmed to zero, channel by channel, by manually adjusting the drain current of the input FETs. In Fig. 2 we propose a simple circuit structure able to address this issue by automatically supplying a proper amount of compensation current to the input of the FET. It must be pointed out that the shown circuit is neither a Base Line Restorer (BLR) nor a Base Line Holder (BLH) [1][3]. In fact, as is well known, BLRs and BLHs are time-varying circuits, whose parameters typically change when the signal at the shaper-amplier output crosses a preset threshold. Consequently use of a BLR-equipped shaper-amplier, either analog or digital, in conjunction with the proposed preamplier, is correct and advisable if the system is subject to low-frequency disturbances or in high event-rate conditions. This given, the proposed circuit structure is benecial twofold. First, it automatically zeroes the DC voltage at the preamplier output with no trimming, irrespective of the FET bias point and the intensity of the sensors dark current. Second, it makes the charge reset faster with no change of sensitivity and no additional noise. This latter effect is obtained through a mechanism which reduces the effective value of the feedback resistor, making it a cold resistor [4], i.e. a resistive device with less noise than a physical resistor of same value. Studies addressing individually these two issues can be found in literature [5][10], but to the best of our knowledge, this is the rst time that a unied such solution is proposed.

0018-9499/$26.00 2010 IEEE

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Fig. 2. Modied charge amplier. The operational amplier A is placed in a new negative feedback loop closed through R . This loop cancels the output offset.

Fig. 3. Open-loop path for the study of the stability of the offset-removal mechanism.

II. METHOD Let us study the circuit of Fig. 2. The return voltage at the is provided through a new path which includes right pin of and . operational amplier , , A. Output Offset Removal Let us rst analyse the mechanism that removes the output offset. To do this let us put temporarily (2) and open explicitly the negative feedback loop which provides offset cancellation. This is shown in Fig. 3, where a test input and the corresponding loop-path output are highlighted as an example of convenient input/output pair for the calculation of the loop gain. The Proportional-Integrative (PI) amplier , along with the charge sensing block constitute the negative feedback loop under analysis. Let us rst consider the DC condition. In this case the error variable of the feedback loop can be visualized as the difference between the non-inverting and the inverting inputs of . Note that when the loop is coincides with that closed the preamplier output voltage of the non-inverting input of . Because the inverting input of is kept to ground through (or to the voltage of pin force output offset), the feedback loop will ultimately bring to the ground voltage (or that of pin force output offset) in order to minimize the error variable. This yields offset cancellation. The time scale of this process depends on the feedback loop is used to bandwidth and is set by . Optional resistor and should be chosen equal compensate the bias currents of is not compensated and will thus to . The offset voltage of affect the nal offset of the circuit. Therefore an operational amplier with low offset voltage should be chosen for . No large bandwidth is instead required for . Let us now consider the feedback loop behaviour vs frequency in order to evaluate its stability. Looking at Fig. 3 and can be with a bit of calculations the transfer function analytically derived, (3)
Fig. 4. Bode plot of jG j. The slope of the gain crossover at dB/decade, which ensures circuit stability.

is

20

where is the independent variable in the Laplace domain, is the DC gain of operational amplier and is the frequency of its dominant pole, and (4) (5) Transfer function (3) shows two poles and one zero. Putting in (3) where is the imaginary unit and is the , angular frequency one can easily draw the Bode plot of as shown in Fig. 4. Provided that (6) and (7) gain crossover occurs at and the slope of at crossover is 20 dB/decade, which ensures stability of the offset-cancellation loop [11]. After some obvious calculations the overall closed-loop transfer function of the proposed circuit is found, or the

(8)

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NUCLEAR SCIENCE, VOL. 57, NO. 2, APRIL 2010

where the input signal are given by

is in terms of detector current and

(9) Using condition (7), one obtains and which yields the closed-loop circuit transfer function

(10) It consists of the product of two single-pole contributions. , coincides with the The rst contribution, i.e. transfer function of the simple charge amplier of Fig. 1, while the second contribution is due to the offset cancellation mechanism. It could be argued that a similar result would be obtained by simply AC coupling the output of the charge amplier of Fig. 1. However the proposed solution offers an important advantage: the DC voltage at the output of the Transimpedance Amplier is physically zeroed, which optimises its dynamic range and linearity. B. Reduction of the Decay Time Constant The proposed solution allows reduction of the preamplier reset time with no reduction of or , i.e. with no change of and no increase of parallel noise. A charge sensitivity shorter reset time is useful to reduce the pileup at high counting rates and/or could be used as an effective alternative to Pole/ Zero stages, requiring no trimming for Pole/Zero cancellation. This is obtained by dropping condition (2), or putting

Fig. 5. Scope screenshot showing the input test signal and the output signals obtained with the traditional resistive reset (before) and with the offset-free solution here presented (after). The time scale is 1 ms/div, and the voltage scale for the output waveforms is 50 mV/div.

lower than that of a physical resistance having the same value . In this sense it acts as a cold resistor. as III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS A. Offset Removal and Time Constant Reduction We realized the proposed circuit by modifying a simple charge amplier of the type of that of Fig. 1. Fig. 5 shows the output waveforms seen before and after the modication. Considering that the shown waveforms are halved by the 50 termination resistor it can be seen that an original offset of about 300 mV is fully removed. The very fast rise time of 6 ns (not shown) is unchanged. In this case we chose , , , , . from 0 to 26 the fall time By increasing the value of is reduced, as expected. Owing to the parasitic capacitance in any further increase of yields an apparent parallel to loss of gain as described in [7] and therefore is not advisable. B. Noise and Dynamic Range We then studied the noise behaviour of the circuit with and without modication. The noise density as referred to the input current is shown in Fig. 6. The upper subplot shows the noise as obtained from computer simulation. As can be seen the offset cancellation circuitry is expected to introduce no extra noise. At low frequencies the noise is white and is in good agreement with of the Johnson the expected value (13) of noise of the feedback resistor. At high frequencies the noise gets proportional to the squared frequency as obtained by referring to the input the thermal noise of the JFET channel [12]. The lower subplot of Fig. 6 shows the input-referred noise of the circuit as measured using a low-noise high-gain amplier and a network/spectrum analyzer. Because the shielding as well as the power supply lters of the circuit were imperfect a few peaks caused by low- and high-frequency pickups are visible. However it is experimentally evident that no extra noise is introduced

(11) which makes the high-frequency gain G of the non-inverting equal to . As a result the reset time amplier constant gets reduced by a factor G, by virtue of the mechanism described in [7] and [9]. The effect is equivalent to putting a reduced feedback resistor

(12) in the basic circuit of Fig. 1. The noise brought about by the feedback resistor is however still dictated by the physical re, and not by its equivalent counterpart, or sistor

(13) where symbol designates contribution of to the inputcurrent noise spectrum, K is the Boltzmann constant and T is the absolute temperature. The overall effect, therefore, is that of with a parallel noise given by (13), i.e. a feedback resistor

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Fig. 6. Equivalent noise density referred to the detector current, as obtained before and after using the proposed offset cancellation technique. The upper subplot shows data from a computer simulation. The lower subplot shows experimental data. In both cases the noise spectrum is unaffected by the offset cancellation circuitry.

Fig. 7. Signal and noise as seen at the shaper ampliers output. In the upper subplot a very large signal is shown, just below the shapers saturation limit.

by the offset cancellation circuitry. At low frequency a white noise-component (a) is seen which again is in excellent agreement with the expected value (13). At higher frequencies the noise shows a component (b) proportional to the frequency and a component (c) proportional to the squared frequency. Noise component (b) comes from the series 1/f noise of the input JFET [12]. This was not observed in the simulation because the electrical model of the device did not include the 1/f noise. However it is a classical noise component in this context [13][15] and often yields an important loss of resolution in pulse-height measurements because its spectral content largely overlaps to that of the signal. Noise component (c) has a spectral density

TABLE I PREAMPLIFIERS FEATURES

With the used shaper amplier set at minimum gain, saturating at 12.5 V Virtually obtained with an ideal non saturating shaper amplier Dened as the ratio of the maximum-signal height to 2

(14) is the JFET transconductance, is frequency and is where a constant parameter [12]. This noise component comes physically from the thermal noise of the JFET channel [16]. In Fig. 6 it can be seen that this component is even lower than that returned by the simulation. In the computer simulation, in fact, we could not use the model of the actual JFET [17] because it was not available in the software libraries. We used instead the model of a less performant JFET, with lower transconductance, which consistently yields a larger value for the noise contribution shown in (14). The Equivalent Noise Charge of the circuit is 94.5 7 electrons r.m.s., or equivalently 650 46 eV fwhm for Ge detectors, as measured using a quasi-Gaussian shaper amplier with a shaping time of 3 . The circuit dynamic range is 86 dB as evaluated in Fig. 7, where the maximum signal and the noise are shown as seen at the shaper amplier output. Signal saturation at 12.5 V, however, is caused by the shaper amplier rather than by the preamplier. The full dynamic range of the preamplier, obtained virtually with an ideal non-saturating shaper amplier is as high as 94 dB, as shown in Table I, where the principal preamplier features are summarized. C. Circuit Behavior at Increasing Event Rates The circuit behavior at increasing event rates has been studied by simulating the detector signals with a Random Pulse Generator, model BNC DB-2, injecting randomly spaced charge pulses at the preampliers input through a calibrated test capacitance. In Fig. 8 a sample of the signal waveform is shown as seen at the preampliers or at the shapers output, where the event rate was of 4 kcount/s. The typical staircase-like shape is observed at the preampliers output. We used here , which yields the longest decay time a jumper in place of constant, and hence the worst case for the pileup at the preampliers output. The shaper separates most pulses, but in two cases, highlighted in the gure, an evident pileup is observed even after the shapers action. In the upper subplot of Fig. 8 it can be noted that sometimes the preamplier waveform goes negative, which could surprise at rst sight considering that the quiescent point was zero after offset removal. But this is not really surprising, given that a superposition of nite-area pulses is

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IV. CONCLUSION We introduced a circuit technique able to eliminate the DC offset of charge preampliers for semiconductor detectors. The circuit yields also a reduction of the preamplier decay time constant by a factor that can be freely set in the typical range of 1 to 10. The circuit working principle has been illustrated and an analytical model of the circuit has been developed. Experimental results have been shown, which validate the theoretical analysis. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors thank C. Boiano and R. Bassini for stimulating discussions and technical support.
Fig. 8. Waveforms seen at the preampliers output (upper subplot) and at the shaper ampliers output (lower subplot).

REFERENCES
[1] E. Fairstein, Gated baseline restorer with adjustable asymmetry, IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci., vol. NS-22, no. 1, pp. 463466, Feb. 1975. [2] V. Radeka, Trapezoidal ltering of signals from large germanium detectors at high rates, IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci., vol. NS-19, no. 1, pp. 412428, Feb. 1972. [3] G. De Geronimo, P. OConnor, and J. Grosholz, A CMOS Baseline Holder (BLH) for readout ASICs, IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci., vol. 47, no. 3, pp. 818822, Jun. 2000. [4] E. Gatti and P. F. Manfredi, Processing the signals from solid-state detectors in elementary-particle physics, La Rivista del Nuovo Cimento, vol. 9, pp. 106110, 1986, and pp. 123126. [5] G. De Geronimo, A. Kandasamy, and P. OConnor, Analog CMOS peak detect and hold circuit-Part 1. Analysis of the classical conguration, Nucl. Instrum. Methods Phys. Res A, vol. A484, pp. 533543, 2002. [6] G. De Geronimo, A. Kandasamy, and P. OConnor, Analog CMOS peak detect and hold circuit-Part 2. The two-phase offset free and derandomizing conguration, Nucl. Instrum. Methods Phys. Res A, vol. A484, pp. 544556, 2002. [7] A. Pullia, R. Bassini, C. Boiano, and S. Brambilla, A cold discharge mechanism for low-noise fast charge ampliers, IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci., vol. 48, no. 3, pp. 530534, Jun. 2001. [8] M. A. Mikhailov, Active decay time constant shaping in resistive feedback charge preampliers, Nucl. Instrum. Methods Phys. Res A, vol. A344, pp. 402405, 1994. [9] W. W. Goldsworthy, Time-constant reduction in charge-sensitive preampliers, Nucl. Instrum. Methods, vol. 54, p. 301, 1967. [10] M. Sampietro, G. Bertuccio, and L. Fasoli, Current mirror reset for low-power BiCMOS charge amplier, Nucl. Instrum. Methods Phys. Res A, vol. A439, pp. 373377, 2000. [11] R. D. Middlebroock, Measurement of loop gain in feedback systems, Int. J. Electron., vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 485512, 1975. [12] A. Pullia, How to derive the optimum lter in presence of arbitrary noises, time-domain constraints, and shaped input signals: A new method, Nucl. Instrum. Methods Phys. Res A, vol. A397, pp. 414425, 1997. [13] E. Gatti, M. Sampietro, and P. F. Manfredi, Optimum lters for detector charge measurements in presence of 1/f noise, Nucl. Instrum. Methods Phys. Res A, vol. A287, pp. 513520, 1990. [14] E. Gatti, P. F. Manfredi, M. Sampietro, and V. Speziali, Suboptimal ltering of 1/f-noise in detector charge measurements, Nucl. Instrum. Methods Phys. Res A, vol. A297, pp. 467478, 1990. [15] A. Pullia, Impact of non-white noises in amplitude measurements: A time-domain approach, Nucl. Instrum. Methods Phys. Res A, vol. A405, pp. 121125, 1998. [16] A. van der Ziel, Thermal noise in eld effect transistors, Proc. IRE, vol. 50, pp. 18081812, 1962. [17] Model BF862, NXP Semiconductors. [18] V. Radeka, Effect of baseline restoration on signal-to-noise ratio in pulse amplitude measurements, Rev. Sci. Instrum., vol. 38, no. 10, pp. 13971403, 1967.

Fig. 9. Width of the pulser line versus the event rate (CPS, Counts Per Second). The line width is in equivalent energy for Ge detectors (left axis) or in Equivalent Noise Charge (right axis).

supplied at the input of a circuit whose transfer function has a zero in the origin. This yields an area balanced output waveform as can be found analytically using the Campbells theorem [4], which implies a negative shift of the waveform itself. In Fig. 9 the noise of the preamplier is shown versus the event rate in the 0.25 to 4 kcount/s, using shaping times in the 1 to 6 range. This measurement has been performed by evaluating the width of the pulser line, as acquired with a commercial Pulse Height Analyzer. As expected the noise tends to grow as the event rate is increased as an effect of tail-to-pulse pileup. Such effect is quite normal and is more evident at long shaping times because the width of the signals and the tails gets wider. No abnormal line shift or growth of the noise is observed. It can be seen that at low counting rates use of the shapers BLR causes an increase of the noise, as expected considering that the BLR adversely affects the noise weighting function of the shaper amplier [18]. However at higher counting rates, where the effects of tail-to-pulse pileup tend to grow, the BLR evidently helps keep the noise low. No pileup rejector has been used in these measurements.