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Performance of SOI Pixel Sensors Developed for X-ray Astronomy

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 نشر من قبل Takaaki Tanaka
 تاريخ النشر 2018
  مجال البحث فيزياء
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We have been developing monolithic active pixel sensors for X-rays based on the silicon-on-insulator technology. Our device consists of a low-resistivity Si layer for readout CMOS electronics, a high-resistivity Si sensor layer, and a SiO$_2$ layer between them. This configuration allows us both high-speed readout circuits and a thick (on the order of $100~mu{rm m}$) depletion layer in a monolithic device. Each pixel circuit contains a trigger output function, with which we can achieve a time resolution of $lesssim 10~mu{rm s}$. One of our key development items is improvement of the energy resolution. We recently fabricated a device named XRPIX6E, to which we introduced a pinned depleted diode (PDD) structure. The structure reduces the capacitance coupling between the sensing area in the sensor layer and the pixel circuit, which degrades the spectral performance. With XRPIX6E, we achieve an energy resolution of $sim 150$~eV in full width at half maximum for 6.4-keV X-rays. In addition to the good energy resolution, a large imaging area is required for practical use. We developed and tested XRPIX5b, which has an imaging area size of $21.9~{rm mm} times 13.8~{rm mm}$ and is the largest device that we ever fabricated. We successfully obtain X-ray data from almost all the $608 times 384$ pixels with high uniformity.



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We have been developing a new type of X-ray pixel sensors, XRPIX, allowing us to perform imaging spectroscopy in the wide energy band of 1-20 keV for the future Japanese X-ray satellite FORCE. The XRPIX devices are fabricated with complementary metal -oxide-semiconductor silicon-on-insulator technology, and have the Event-Driven readout mode, in which only a hit event is read out by using hit information from a trigger output function equipped with each pixel. This paper reports on the low-energy X-ray performance of the XRPIX6E device with a Pinned Depleted Diode (PDD) structure. The PDD structure especially reduces the readout noise, and hence is expected to largely improve the quantum efficiencies for low-energy X-rays. While F-K X-rays at 0.68 keV and Al-K X-rays at 1.5 keV are successfully detected in the Frame readout mode, in which all pixels are read out serially without using the trigger output function, the device is able to detect Al-K X-rays, but not F-K X-rays in the Event-Driven readout mode. Non-uniformity is observed in the counts maps of Al-K X-rays in the Event-Driven readout mode, which is due to region-to-region variation of the pedestal voltages at the input to the comparator circuit. The lowest available threshold energy is 1.1 keV for a small region in the device where the non-uniformity is minimized. The noise of the charge sensitive amplifier at the sense node and the noise related to the trigger output function are ~$18~e^-$ (rms) and ~$13~e^-$ (rms), respectively.
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We have been developing the X-ray silicon-on-insulator (SOI) pixel sensor called XRPIX for future astrophysical satellites. XRPIX is a monolithic active pixel sensor consisting of a high-resistivity Si sensor, thin SiO$_2$ insulator, and CMOS pixel c ircuits that utilize SOI technology. Since XRPIX is capable of event-driven readouts, it can achieve high timing resolution greater than $sim 10{rm ~mu s}$, which enables low background observation by adopting the anti-coincidence technique. One of the major issues in the development of XRPIX is the electrical interference between the sensor layer and circuit layer, which causes nonuniform detection efficiency at the pixel boundaries. In order to reduce the interference, we introduce a Double-SOI (D-SOI) structure, in which a thin Si layer (middle Si) is added to the insulator layer of the SOI structure. In this structure, the middle Si layer works as an electrical shield to decouple the sensor layer and circuit layer. We measured the detector response of the XRPIX with D-SOI structure at KEK. We irradiated the X-ray beam collimated with $4{rm ~mu mphi}$ pinhole, and scanned the device with $6{rm ~mu m}$ pitch, which is 1/6 of the pixel size. In this paper, we present the improvement in the uniformity of the detection efficiency in D-SOI sensors, and discuss the detailed X-ray response and its physical origins.
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