Fast event recognition for x-ray silicon imagers

Future X-ray astronomy observatories will employ high-speed silicon-based active pixel sensors to obtain wide fields of view with good radiation hardness and low levels of detector saturation (pileup). Detector readout rates envisioned for missions such as Athena and X-ray Surveyor are far too high for existing software-based event recognition techniques to be able to extract the X-ray events from the data stream. We report on the development of high-speed event recognition electronics tailored to the requirements of these new detectors.