Speaker
Description
Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (MAPS) are a rapidly growing technology to equip low-power, low-material budget, high spatial resolution particle detectors. Their notable latest large-scale instalment, a 10 m2 detector made from 24 thousand sensors ("ALPIDE") in the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN marks an important milestone in the maturity of the technology.
Driven by a large-scale industrial and commercial demand for producing (near-)visible imaging sensors, the technology is quickly advancing towards deeper sub-micron nodes and higher integration densities. In particular, over the last decade, a number of features could be integrated into these sensors that were previously only possible with hybrid technologies. Examples are complex in-pixel front-ends and in-matrix data sparsification, but, importantly, also radiation hardness to total ionising dose (TID), non-ionising doses (NIEL) and single event effects (SEU, SEL). The latter were improved by orders of magnitude, making the technology suitable for demanding applications at the hearts of collider experiments – but also making them very appealing for space missions, that are in fact facing similar requirements.
Exemplarily, the low power consumptions of MAPS, achieved through an intrinsically small detector capacitance (O(1-5fF)) and hence large Q/C ratio, makes the devices particularly attractive for power critical applications, allowing to "pixelate" detectors that previously had to revert to strip detectors to fit into the power budget.
This contribution will review the state of the art of MAPS, highlighting recent examples and results achieved in 180nm and 65nm CMOS processes and will give an outlook towards future developments in the field.
