About the Instrumentation Group

The MCSS Instrumentation Group supports scientific advancement by providing through design, collaboration or procurement state of the art instrumentation for applications requiring the detection and measurement of X-rays or other radiation.

We are a relatively new group which aims to build and maintain expertise in a highly specialised technology. We have already managed to attract experienced staff in the areas of X-ray physics semiconductor detectors, gas detectors, microelectronics and field programmable gate arrays in addition to software and system modelling. The group currently consists of around eight staff and will build over the coming year to around twelve. Involvement in fundamental research and development is therefore encouraged amongst staff.

We are building up infrastructure and test equipment to allow us to design, develop and commission X-ray detection systems. Our current software suite includes Mentor graphics, 180nm microelectronics design tools, Altium designer 6 (for schematic and PCB design) and an Altera  design suite for FPGA. For systems development we also have Matlab, IDL and Labview.

Current collaborations include:

1. A Collaborative Research Centre in Biomedical Imaging Development. This involves two detector developments for medical imaging.
2. A Centre of Excellence in Coherent X-ray Science (COEinCXS) with Melbourne, La Trobe and Swinburne universities. This requires the development of a high dynamic range imaging detector.
3. An ARC Discovery Project with University of Melbourne to provide a readout system for the Pilatus detector system.

Other projects

A general-purpose ultra-high performance data acquisition card (GDAQ1) has been developed by the Instrumentation Group to acquire and process data streams from the next generation of X-ray detector systems. Coupled with an in-house high performance software suite (Jetpack ), this acquisition system places the group at the cutting edge of detector instrumentation and is expected to provide significant revenue streams in the near future.

The Instrumentation Group is also researching other detector technologies. A traditional Multi Wire Proportional Counter (MWPC) as well as a high rate Gas Electron Multiplier (GEM ) - based X-ray detector are currently under development.