At the European Crystallographic Meeting in Marrakech, Morocco, Oxford Diffraction launched the Atlas CCD detector which it says provides ultimate X-ray data quality up to 3.5x faster than other CCDs
The all new Atlas CCD detector from Oxford Diffraction is described as the ideal detector for high speed, high resolution data collections on small molecules.
As the fastest commercially-available CCD detector the Atlas is up to 3.5 times faster than other CCD detectors, says the company.
The Atlas is of entirely new electronic design and incorporates Oxford Diffraction's proven patented construction for easy service and support.
At 135mm active area diameter the Atlas is ideally suited for both molybdenum and copper wavelength data collections and incorporates the new 'Super plus' scintillator which provides up to 70% greater sensitivity.
A true 18-bit detector the Atlas is the highest dynamic range CCD detector commercially available and uniquely utilises data transfer via a dedicated high speed 1Gb ethernet connection.
At the heart of the Atlas detector is the 2k x 2k Kodak KAF-4320 CCD chip of four-port read out design which provides readout speeds as low as 0.2sec.
While other CCD manufacturers claim similar speeds, quoting the CCD chip manufacturers' readout times, the reality is that their all important 'duty cycle' is significantly longer and can be up to an order of magnitude greater says Oxford Diffraction.
Oxford Diffraction's Atlas detector actually achieves sub-second 'duty cycle' times resulting in a significant increase in the speed of data collection and thus throughput of crystals studied.
Leigh Rees, marketing director for Oxford Diffraction, explained this significant speed increase: "The Atlas CCD can achieve these extremely fast data collection speeds where all others fail due to the Atlas detector's entirely new design incorporating our proprietary multi-threaded, parallel data pipelining technology (PDPT) which serves to reduce data collection dead time at all stages to a minimum and importantly allows multiple processes to be run in parallel rather than the old fashioned serial, one process at a time approach adopted by other CCDs".
