The Large Area Picosecond PhotoDetector (LAPPD) project is a multi-year project involving a number of institutions, with a goal to create a microchannel plate photodetector (MCP-PMT) that has the same very high performance as existing MCP-PMTs, but at a significantly lower cost. Recently, the LAPPD collaboration successfully commercialized the production of 20 × 20 cm² standard LAPPD^TM through the industrial collaborator.

Within the LAPPD project, a photodetector production facility dedicated to fabricating 6 × 6 cm² fast-timing MCP-PMTs was designed and built at Argonne National Laboratory. In this talk, I will report detailed design, fabrication and characterization of both 6 × 6 cm² MCP-PMTs and 20 × 20 cm² LAPPD^TM based on next-generation microchannel plates. The flexible photodetector design provides the potential of modifying individual components as well as the entire configuration to fit for different applications. Optimizations of current design driven by different applications such as particle identification, calorimeter and X-ray imaging will also be reported.