CMOS Pixel Sensors (CPS) are attractive for CEPC vertex detector construction due to its high granularity, high speed, low material budgets, low power and potential high radiation tolerance. The characteristics of the sensing diode and the readout architecture were studied using several chips with small-scaled pixel array for CEPC vertex detector. This paper will study the design of a high data-rate readout logic design of a 512 × 1024 pixel array. For the innermost layer of CEPC vertex detector, the hit pixel frequency is near 120 MHz, which is several times higher than the design requirements of ALPIDE for ALICE vertex detector. Based on the hit-driven readout scheme in the pixel array of ALPIDE and FEI3, we propose a new peripheral readout logic design. All the double columns of pixels are read out in parallel and a fast readout architecrue of 512 double columns is realized. Meanwhile, a real-time data compression and a trigger-mode operation are supported to reduce the data output. The simulation results indicate the pixel hit frequency in average of 120 MHz can be processed with readout time of 50 ns per pixel and of less than 500 ns per double column of pixels. The layout area is 25.68 × 1.13 mm². The power density in trigger mode and in triggerless mode are estimated as 25 ~ 30 mW/cm² and 35 ~ 45 mW/cm² respectively.

The perception systems of autonomous vehicles are crucial for their safety. However, their reliability is significantly undermined by adverse weather conditions like rain, sandstorms, and haze, which obscure critical details and lead to object detection failures. To address these issues, a YOLOv8n-based Adverse Weather Dual-backbone YOLO (AWD-YOLO) is proposed. The core contributions are the hierarchical feature fusion strategy and the Faster Local-Region Self-Attention (FLRSA) module. The hierarchical feature fusion strategy employs a dual-backbone network that extracts complementary features from both raw and preprocessed images. These features are integrated using shallow concatenation, a Dual Feature Scale Enhancement (DFSE) module, and a Dual Coordinate and Channel Attention (DCA) module to preserve details and enhance semantics. The FLRSA module is specifically designed to efficiently capture critical local features. Furthermore, a dedicated small-object detection head and the Wise-IoU v3 loss function are utilized to improve localization accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AWD-YOLO attained an mAP@0.5 of 67.7% and an mAP@0.5:0.9 of 40.8% on the DAWN dataset, marking enhancements of 15.4% and 8.1% over YOLOv8n, respectively. Additionally, AWD-YOLO exhibits robustness on the RTTS and ACDC datasets, outperforming YOLOv8n by 6.9% and 12.5% in terms of mAP@0.5. These results highlight AWD-YOLO’s potential to enhance the reliability of autonomous driving perception systems in adverse weather.

The Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC) has been proposed to enable more thorough and precise measurements of the properties of Higgs, W, and Z bosons, as well as to search for new physics. In response to the stringent performance requirements of the vertex detector for the CEPC, a baseline vertex detector prototype was tested and characterized for the first time using a 6GeV electron beam at DESY II Test Beam Line 21. The baseline vertex detector prototype is designed with a cylindrical barrel structure that contains six double-sided detector modules (ladders). Each side of the ladder includes TaichuPix-3 sensors based on Monolithic Active Pixel Sensor (MAPS) technology, a flexible printed circuit, and a carbon fiber support structure. Additionally, the readout electronics and the Data Acquisition system were also examined during this beam test. The performance of the prototype was evaluated using an electron beam that passed through six ladders in a perpendicular direction. The offline data analysis indicates a spatial resolution of about 5 μm, with detection efficiency exceeding 99% and an impact parameter resolution of about 5.1 μm. These promising results from this baseline vertex detector prototype mark a significant step toward realizing the optimal vertex detector for the CEPC.