The production of the strip sensors for the ATLAS Inner Tracker (ITk) will start in 2020. Nearly 22,000 large area sensors will be produced over a period of about five years by Hamamatsu Photonics ...K.K. (HPK). The institutes involved in the sensor development and production are committed to deliver and maintain the highest quality sensors for the experiment. A Quality Assurance (QA) strategy has been prepared to be carried out during the whole production period. Once the process has been characterized as providing the required pre-irradiation specifications and the proper radiation hardness, the onus is on the manufacturer to rigidly stick to that qualified process. Still, sample testing with specific device-element structures and irradiation of devices should be implemented by the ITk sensor collaboration.
A detailed irradiation and testing plan has been prepared by the ATLAS-ITk Collaboration, together with a newly designed test chip with specific structures to monitor different key technological and device parameters during the whole production. The tests and irradiations will be carried out on a sample basis. In order to have a practical methodology, samples from alternating batches will be sent for irradiations with protons, neutrons and gammas, and then tested in order to check that the characteristics remain within specifications. The detailed plan and the design and test methods for the structures in the test chip are presented here.
Eagle bones from Spanish cave reveal the long-standing Neanderthal jewelry tradition.
Evidence for the symbolic behavior of Neanderthals in the use of personal ornaments is relatively scarce. Among ...the few ornaments documented, eagle talons, which were presumably used as pendants, are the most frequently recorded. This phenomenon appears concentrated in a specific area of southern Europe during a span of 80 thousand years. Here, we present the analysis of one eagle pedal phalange recovered from the Châtelperronian layer of Foradada Cave (Spain). Our research broadens the known geographical and temporal range of this symbolic behavior, providing the first documentation of its use among the Iberian populations, as well as of its oldest use in the peninsula. The recurrent appearance of large raptor talons throughout the Middle Paleolithic time frame, including their presence among the last Neanderthal populations, raises the question of the survival of some cultural elements of the Middle Paleolithic into the transitional Middle to Upper Paleolithic assemblages and beyond.
The ATLAS community is facing the last stages prior to the production of the upgraded silicon strip Inner Tracker for the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider. An extensive Market Survey was carried ...out in order to evaluate the capability of different foundries to fabricate large area silicon strip sensors, satisfying the ATLAS specifications. The semiconductor manufacturing company, Infineon Technologies AG, was one of the two foundries, along with Hamamatsu Photonics K.K., that reached the last stage of the evaluation for the production of the new devices. The full prototype wafer layout for the participation of Infineon, called ATLAS17LS-IFX, was designed using a newly developed Python-based Automatic Layout Generation Tool, able to rapidly design sensors with different characteristics and dimensions based on a few geometrical and technological input parameters. This work presents the layout design process and the results obtained from the evaluation of the new Infineon large area sensors before and after proton and neutron irradiations, up to fluences expected in the inner layers of the future ATLAS detector.
The planned upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider, the HL-LHC, requires the development of improved tracking silicon sensors for the main CERN experiments. These devices must fulfil the specifications ...established by the different detectors for the adverse HL-LHC working conditions, in order to guarantee the proper performance of the tracking systems during the lifetime of the experiments. In the framework of the ATLAS Inner-Tracker sensor Market Survey, a prototype strip sensor layout has been designed by the collaboration, and fabricated in 6-inch substrates by Infineon Technologies AG. This work presents a set of test structures included in this prototype, capable to evaluate key device and technological parameters as strip implant resistivity, bias resistance, coupling capacitance, surface currents, or the influence of the sensor edge design in device breakdown voltage. A complete analysis of these parameters before and after proton and gamma irradiations, up to fluences and doses similar to the ones expected in the future HL-LHC experiments, is presented. This study shows the relevance of microelectronic test structures in the development of technologies of tracking silicon sensors for High Energy Physics experiments.
The ATLAS experiment is going to replace the current Inner Detector with an all new inner tracker (ITk) in the ATLAS detector for HL-LHC at CERN. Silicon strip detectors cover the outer layers of the ...barrel and the endcap sections. We have designed and fabricated a prototype single-sided n+-in-p AC-coupled silicon strip sensor for the outer barrel layer with long strips (LS), ATLAS17LS. It is of the maximum allowable size to fit in a 6-in. silicon wafer, with an outer dimension of 9.80(width)×9.76(length)cm2. The sensor features two rows of LS strip segments, 4.83 cm strip length per segment, a strip pitch of 75.5 μm, and a slim edge design. We have implemented technology for high voltage operation of up to 1000V, with a good signal collection after irradiation fluence of 5.6 × 1014neq∕cm2at the end of HL-LHC operation.
We had two objectives for the ATLAS17LS fabrication: qualification of the sensor design and fabrication quality, and providing an adequate number of the sensors for prototyping the building blocks of the strip detector. The sensors were fabricated in 3 batches by HPK with standard wafers from the foundry (320 μm physical thickness). Additional 10 sensors were fabricated with a thinner active thickness of 240 μm to investigate the influence of active thickness on charge collection. Another additional 5 sensors, with special passivation to investigate the influence of passivation on humidity sensitivity. The visual inspection of fabricated sensors revealed an inadequacy that the designed metal width of 10 μm was too narrow. The initial measurements by the vendor showed that the sensors fulfilled the specifications: onset voltages of Microdischarge VMD above the operation voltage VOP (700V for the 1st and 2nd batches; 500V for the 3rd batch, which has improved the yield), leakage currents of < 0.1μA/cm2 at VOP, full depletion voltages VFD< 330V, and rates of bad strips <<1%.
Humidity sensitivity of large area silicon sensors: Study and implications Fernández-Tejero, J.; Allport, P.P.; Aviñó, O. ...
Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment,
10/2020, Volume:
978, Issue:
C
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The production of large area sensors is one of the main challenges that the ATLAS collaboration faces for the new Inner-Tracker full-silicon detector. During the prototype fabrication phase for the ...High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider upgrade, several ATLAS institutes observed indications of humidity sensitivity of large area sensors, even at relative humidities well below the dew point. Specifically, prototype Barrel and End-Cap silicon strip sensors fabricated in 6-inch wafers manifest a prompt decrease of the breakdown voltage when operating under high relative humidity, adversely affecting the performance of the sensors. In addition to the investigation of these prototype sensors, a specific fabrication batch with special passivation is also studied, allowing for a deeper understanding of the responsible mechanisms.
This work presents an extensive study of this behaviour on large area sensors. The locations of the hotspots at the breakdown voltage at high humidity are revealed using different infrared thermography techniques. Several palliative treatments are attempted, proving the influence of sensor cleaning methods, as well as baking, on the device performance, but no improvement on the humidity sensitivity was achieved. Furthermore, a study of the incidence of the sensitivity in different batches is also presented, introducing a hypothesis of the origins of the humidity sensitivity associated to the sensor edge design, together with passivation thickness and conformity. Several actions to be taken during sensor production and assembly are extracted from this study, in order to minimize the impact of humidity sensitivity on the performance of large area silicon sensors for High Energy Physics experiments.
The ATLAS detector community is entering in the final stages of sensor development for the future upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). An increase by an order of magnitude of the LHC ...luminosity, up to 1035 cm−2s−1, will lead to an increased radiation dose delivered to the detector, especially for the devices located in the Inner Tracker. In 2018, an experimental study of the damages induced by a beam-loss over silicon strip detectors was done in the High-Radiation to Materials facility at CERN. A progressive number of proton bunches was extracted from the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron, and focused directly over the strip sensor, in order to emulate the large amount of charge typically generated in a beam-loss failure. This work presents the results obtained during this experiment, showing that Punch-Through Protection effectively protects the AC-coupling capacitors of the silicon sensors from large charge accumulations, but still this scenario could induce damages on the read-out electronics.
PDF
