Processing and interconnections of semiconductor sensors for photon and particle radiation detection

Abstract

Semiconductor radiation detectors have made tremendous progress in the past few decades, increasing our understanding of physics with their detection precision. Despite these advances, there are several items that can be improved and developed. For instance, the method of sensor fabrication can be more simplified thus, the attention is given to the sensor processing this research.

The detector bare module consisted of a segmented semiconductor sensor and an ASIC read-out chip (ROC). In the case of pixel detectors, the interconnection technology enables to complete a hybrid bare module. The hybrid bare module based on PSI46dig ROC read-out was used for this research with a read-out capability is 160 Mbit/s with a chip size of 7.9 × 10.3 mm2. The produced sensors were designed and fabricated in accordance with this ROC design.

This thesis focuses especially on processing of sensors made of silicon and CdTe materials. Interconnection technology efforts are also emphasized as well. In particular, the research scope was to implement a more simple process introducing atomic layer deposition (ALD) thin film technology and the preparation of future higher density sensor structures.

The characterization of sensors have been carried out by laboratory measurements using probe stations and transition current technique (TCT) measurements. Furthermore, functional tests of modules using different radioactive sources have been performed with a full read-out chain.