A new type of position sensor (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor Active Pixel Sensor or CMOS-APS) used as readout system in MCP-based intensified photon counters, is presented in this paper. Thanks to the CMOS technology, the pixel addressing and the readout circuits as well as the analogue-to-digital converters are integrated into the chip. This unique characteristic made the CMOS-APS a good candidate to make a very compact, low power consumption, photon counting system. The main

more »

... ces respect to the more classical Photon Counting Intensified CCDs (PC-ICCD), the selected CMOS-APS, the driving and interface electronics based on FPGA, the adopted algorithm to compute the center of the luminous spot on the MCP phosphor screen, are described.