The upgrade of the ATLAS (The ATLAS Collaboration, 2008) tracking detector for the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN requires novel radiation hard silicon sensor technologies. ...Significant effort has been put into the development of monolithic CMOS sensors but it has been a challenge to combine a low capacitance of the sensing node with full depletion of the sensitive layer. Low capacitance brings fast signal response at low noise combined with low analog power. Depletion of the sensitive layer causes the signal charge to be collected by drift sufficiently fast to separate hits from consecutive bunch crossings (25 ns at the LHC) and to avoid losing the charge by trapping after irradiation. This paper focuses on the characterization of charge collection properties and detection efficiency of prototype sensors originally designed in the framework of the ALICE Inner Tracking System (ITS) upgrade. The prototypes are fabricated both in the standard TowerJazz11Manufactured by Tower Semiconductor Ltd, Israel.180 nm CMOS imager process (Senyukov et al., 2013) and in an innovative modification of this process developed in collaboration with the foundry, aimed to fully deplete the sensitive epitaxial layer and enhance the tolerance to non-ionizing energy loss. Sensors fabricated in standard and modified process variants were characterized using radioactive sources, X-ray beam and test beams before and after irradiation. Contrary to sensors manufactured in the standard process, sensors from the modified process remain fully functional even after 1015neq/cm2 which is the expected NIEL radiation fluence for the outer pixel layers in the future ATLAS Inner Tracker (ITk).
In this article, a low-power, radiation-hard front-end circuit for monolithic pixel sensors, designed to meet the requirements of low noise and low pixel-to-pixel variability, the key features to ...achieve high detection efficiencies, is presented. The sensor features a small collection electrode to achieve a small capacitance (<5 fF) and allows full CMOS in-pixel circuitry. The circuit is implemented in the 180-nm CMOS imaging technology from the TowerJazz foundry and integrated into the MALTA2 chip, which is part of a development that targets the specifications of the outer pixel layer of the ATLAS Inner Tracker upgrade at the LHC. One of the main challenges for monolithic sensors is a radiation hardness up to 10 15 1-MeV <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">\text {n}_{\text {eq}}/\text {cm}^{{2}} </tex-math></inline-formula> non-ionizing energy loss (NIEL) and 80 Mrad total ionizing dose (TID) required for this application. Tests up to <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">{3} \cdot {10}^{15} </tex-math></inline-formula> 1-MeV <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">\text {n}_{\text {eq}}/\text {cm}^{{2}} </tex-math></inline-formula> and 100 Mrad were performed on the MALTA2 sensor and front-end circuit, which still show good performance even after these levels of irradiation, promising for even more demanding applications such as the future experiments at the high-luminosity large hadron collider (HL-LHC).
Quad-module characterization with the MALTA monolithic pixel chip Dachs, F.; Zoubir, A.M.; Sharma, A. ...
Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment,
07/2024, Letnik:
1064
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The MALTA silicon pixel detector combines a depleted monolithic active pixel sensor (DMAPS) with a fully asynchronous front-end and readout. It features a high granularity pixel matrix with a 36.4 μm ...symmetric pixel pitch, low power consumption of <1 μW/pixel and low material budget with detector thicknesses as little as 50 μm. It achieves a radiation hardness to 100MRad TID and more than 1 × 10E15 1 MeV neq/cm2 with a time resolution of <2 ns (Pernegger et al., 2023).
In order to cover large sensitive areas efficiently with a minimum of power and data connections the development of modules, comprising of up to 4 MALTA detectors, is studied.
This contribution presents the beam test performance of parallel and serial powered MALTA 4-chip modules in an effort to characterize the sensor’s chip-to-chip data and power transmission and prepare the production of a first prototype of an ultra-light weight 4-chip module on a flexible circuit with next generation MALTA2 sensors.
The upgrade of the tracking detectors for the High Luminosity-LHC (HL-LHC) requires the development of novel radiation hard silicon sensors. The development of Depleted Monolithic Active Pixel ...Sensors targets the replacement of hybrid pixel detectors with radiation hard monolithic CMOS sensors. We designed, manufactured and tested radiation hard monolithic CMOS sensors in the TowerJazz 180 nm CMOS imaging technology with small electrodes pixel designs. These designs can achieve pixel pitches well below current hybrid pixel sensors (typically 50 × 50μm) for improved spatial resolution. Monolithic sensors in our design allow to reduce multiple scattering by thinning to a total silicon thickness of only 50μm. Furthermore monolithic CMOS sensors can substantially reduce detector costs. These well-known advantages of CMOS sensor for performance and costs can only be exploited in pp-collisions at HL-LHC if the DMAPS sensors are designed to be radiation hard, capable of high hit rates and have a fast signal response to satisfy the 25 ns bunch crossing structure of LHC. Through the development of the MALTA and Mini-MALTA sensors we show the necessary steps to achieve radiation hardness at 1015 neq/cm2 for DMAPS with small electrode designs. The sensors combine high granularity (pitch 36.4x36.4μm2), low detector capacitance (<5fF/pixel) of the charge collection electrode (3μm), low noise (ENC≈10 e−) and low power operation (1μW/pixel) with a fast signal response (25 ns bunch crossing). The sensors feature arrays of 512 × 512 (MALTA) and 16 × 64 (Mini-MALTA) pixels. To cope with high hit rates expected at HL-LHC (>200 MHz/cm2) we have implemented a novel high-speed asynchronous readout architecture. The paper summarises the optimisation of the pixel design to achieve radiation hard pixel designs with full efficiency after irradiation at >98% after 1015 neq/cm2).
MALTA monolithic pixel sensors in TowerJazz 180 nm technology Solans Sánchez, C.; Allport, P.; Asensi Tortajada, I. ...
Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment,
12/2023, Letnik:
1057
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Depleted Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors are of highest interest at the HL-LHC and beyond for the replacement of the Pixel trackers in the outermost layers of experiments where the requirement on ...total area and cost effectiveness is much bigger. They aim to provide high granularity and low material budget over large surfaces with ease of integration. Our research focuses on MALTA, a radiation hard DMAPS with small collection electrode designed in TowerJazz 180 nm CMOS imaging technology and asynchronous read-out. Latest prototypes are radiation hard up to 2 × 1015 1 MeV neq/cm2 with a time resolution better than 2 ns.
MALTA2 is a depleted monolithic active pixel sensor (DMAPS) developed in the Tower 180 nm CMOS imaging process. Monolithic CMOS sensors offer advantages over current hybrid imaging sensors both in ...terms of increased tracking performance due to lower material budget but also in terms of ease of integration and construction costs due to the monolithic design. Current research and development efforts are aimed towards radiation-hard designs up to 100 Mrad in Total Ionizing Dose and 3×1015 1 MeV neq/cm2 in Non-Ionizing Energy Loss. One important property of a sensor’s radiation hardness is the depletion depth at which efficient charge collection is achieved via drift movement. Grazing angle test-beam data was taken during the 2023 SPS CERN test beam with the MALTA telescope and Edge Transient Current Technique studies were performed at DESY in order to develop a quantitative study of the depletion depth for un-irradiated, epitaxial MALTA2 samples. The study is planned to be extended for irradiated and Czochralski MALTA2 samples.