Design of a Large Area Digital SiPM with High Fill Factor and Fully Serial Digital Readout for Single Photon Detection in Liquid Noble Gas Detectors

Abstract: We present a 'digital SiPM' photo-detection chip combining single photon sensitive avalanche photo diodes and CMOS readout electronics on a single die. The chip has a size of $8046\times9032\,\mu m^2$ with $72.5\%$ of photo sensitive area. It is subdivided into $32\times30$ pixels with an average size of $250\times291\,\mu m^2$. For each photon hit, the chip records the pixel coordinate and the arrival time with a granularity of $\approx 10\,ns$. Readout and chip control are purely digital, requiring only 4 CMOS signals. Several chips can be daisy chained and grouped on larger modules so that detector planes with $\approx70\%$ photo sensitive area can be build. Our chip may be used in experiments that need to detect rare scintillation events, for instance dark matter searches using liquid noble gases.