The paper describes a multichannel readout system for applications in X-ray diffractometry. The system consists of a silicon strip detector and a mixed-mode 64-channel readout chip RX64. The integrated circuit is implemented in a 0.8 μm CMOS p-well epi-type substrate technology. The single channel comprises a charge sensitive preamplifier, a shaper, a discriminator and a pseudo-random 20-bit counter. To increase the functionality and testability additional blocks like calibration circuit, internal DACs and command decoder are implemented on the chip. The equivalent noise charge (ENC) measured at room temperature for the detector capacitance of 2.5 pF and integration time of 0.7 μs is 167 electrons rms. The power dissipation is below 2.5 mW/channel. The input referred channel-to-channel offset variation is only 28 electrons rms, while the gain spread expressed as sigma to the mean value is 0.5%. The chip occupies the area 2.8 x 6.5 mm^2.