Fulvio Martinelli | EPFL Graph Search

Fulvio Martinelli received his MEng summa cum laude in Electronic Engineering at University of Naples "Federico II" in 2017. In the same year, he pursued his Master's thesis activity at The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. In 2018, he worked as Analog and Mixed-Signal Designer at SK Hynix (Agrate Brianza, Italy) in the Core team of the 3D Flash NAND division of the company. Since September 2018, he has been pursuing a Ph.D. at EPFL in the Advanced Quantum Architectures Laboratory (AQUA) as guest Ph.D. student (under the supervision of Prof. Edoardo Charbon), working at CERN as member of the Thin Time-Of-Flight Positron Emission Tomography (TT-PET) project. His work is mainly focused on the design and testing of the front-end of monolithic SiGe BiCMOS pixel-detectors for medical imaging applications, as Positron Emission Tomography.

SiGe Time Resolving Pixel Detectors for High Energy Physics and Medical Imaging

Fulvio Martinelli

In the last years, sub-nanosecond time-resolved particle detectors have been object of research by many companies and institutes since they represent an efficient tool to improve the performance of detecting systems for various applications such as High Energy Physics (HEP) and medical imaging. The work summarized in this thesis focuses on the design, implementation and testing of high-performance electronics in SiGe BiCMOS technology for the development of timing systems such as gamma-photons detectors for PET scanners or Long-Lived Particles (LLPs) detectors for HEP applications. Design solutions and architectures are presented and analysed and their impact on the performance of timing detectors are emphasized. The main contributions of the thesis also include the development of a non-linearity model for the analysis of the impact of mismatches in free-running ring-oscillator based Time-to-Digital Converters (TDCs) and the implementation of various Genetic Algorithms (GAs) for circuit tuning. A comparison of different types of GAs is presented and the impact of their properties on the performance of the circuits to optimize is analysed. This work describes the design solutions adopted for the implementation of two pre-production ASICs for the upgrade of detecting system of the FASER experiment at CERN. One of them was produced to perform an extensive study on different level of integration of the front-end system inside the pixel area. The second represents a smaller version of the final full-reticle ASIC for the FASER experiment. This work reports and highlights the main design challenges related to the implementation of a monolithic 23.2x15.3 mm2 detector. Part of the thesis is focused on the TT-PET project. The latter aims to develop a monolithic pixel detector characterized by a ~30 ps time resolution to be integrated in a small-animal PET scanner. The design of a compact TDC for the TT-PET project is presented. Its architecture is based on a multi-path free-running Ring-Oscillator (RO) featuring a PLL-less event-by-event calibration system. This system is characterized by a ~33 ps Least Significant Bit (LSB) and its compact area, simplicity and power consumption makes this solution particularly suitable for systems in which the integration of many converters is required. Moreover, the aforementioned non-linearity model allowed demonstrating the source of the performance superiority (in terms of linearity) of the presented design. The PLL-less synchronization system was also integrated in the

EPFL2022

SiGe Time Resolving Pixel Detectors for High Energy Physics and Medical Imaging

Fulvio Martinelli

EPFL2022