A large area counting pixel detector for X-rays has been implemented at the Swiss Light Source (SLS). The format is an 1120 x 967 array of 0.217 x 0.217 mm² pixels covering an area of 24.3 x 21.0 cm². The detector is modular, with each of the 18 modules having an 80 x 34 mm² monolithic pixilated silicon sensor bump-bonded to a 2 x 8 array of custom CMOS readout chips. Each pixel in the readout chip contains an amplifier, a single level discriminator and a 15-bit counter. The readout time of the detector is 6.7 ms, after which counting is re-enabled. However, the framing time is limited to 600 ms by the overhead of transferring the image to disk.

This detector has been successfully used to record protein crystallography data at beamline X06 of the SLS. The detector is especially well-suited to recording fine-φ-sliced data in which the crystal is rotated continuously and the frames are defined by the detector without the use of a mechanical shutter. In this mode, 9000 frames covering a rotation of 180 deg were recorded at 1 frame/s for crystals of insulin and thaumatin. Analysis of these data is in progress. Traditional 0.5 deg rotation data sets of these specimens were also recorded.

Several single-module detectors have been built from the same modules. These have proved very popular at the Materials Science beamline (X04) of the SLS, and in both diffraction and X-ray diffraction experiments at SPring-8. In applications where traditional practice has been to use a point detector, the speed and greater information content of area detector images is greatly appreciated.

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