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XPAD3S is a single-photon-counting chip developed in collaboration by SOLEIL Synchrotron, the Institut Louis Néel and the Centre de Physique de Particules de Marseille. The circuit, designed in the 0.25 µm IBM technology, contains 9600 square pixels with 130 µm side giving a total size of 1 cm × 1.5 cm. The main features of each pixel are: single threshold adjustable from 4.5 keV up to 35 keV, 2 ms frame rate, 107 photons s-1 mm-2 maximum local count rate, and a 12-bit internal counter with overflow allowing a full 27-bit dynamic range to be reached. The XPAD3S was hybridized using the flip-chip technology with both a 500 µm silicon sensor and a 700 µm CdTe sensor with Schottky contacts. Imaging performances of both detectors were evaluated using X-rays from 6 keV up to 35 keV. The detective quantum efficiency at zero line-pairs mm-1 for a silicon sensor follows the absorption law whereas for CdTe a strong deficit at low photon energy, produced by an inefficient entrance layer, is measured. The modulation transfer function was evaluated and it was shown that both detectors present an ideal modulation transfer function at 26 keV, limited only by the pixel size. The influence of the Cd and Te K-edges of the CdTe sensor was measured and simulated, establishing that fluorescence photons reduce the contrast transfer at the Nyquist frequency from 60% to 40% which remains acceptable. The energy resolution was evaluated at 6% with silicon using 16 keV X-rays, and 8% with CdTe using 35 keV X-rays. A 7 cm × 12 cm XPAD3 imager, built with eight silicon modules (seven circuits per module) tiled together, was successfully used for X-ray diffraction experiments. A first result recently obtained with a new 2 cm × 3 cm CdTe imager is also presented.
