In the past few years important progress has been made in the development of 3D silicon radiation detectors due to the anticipated installation schedule of the ATLAS Insertable B Layer during the first long shut down of the LHC in 2013-2014. Three competing technologies have been evaluated for the IBL sensor production, namely silicon planar and 3D sensors, and diamond sensors. Within the ATLAS 3D Sensor Collaboration, the double-sided 3D technologies from FBK-Trento and CNM-Barcelona have been chosen for the IBL Sensor Qualification. Very good results have been achieved both in terms of tracking performance, radiation hardness and fabrication yield and the evaluation from the IBL Review Panel was positive, so that, although planar sensors were chosen as the lowest risk option, the production of 3D sensors is continuing in order to investigate a possible mixed planar-3D IBL scenario.
Double-sided 3D sensors are indeed offering some advantages in terms of process complexity with respect to the original Full 3D sensor technology proposed by Parker and Kenney and currently available at Stanford and SINTEF. In particular, there is no need for bonding and finally removing a support wafer, a fact that, besides reducing the number of process steps, also makes the wafer back-side fully accessible to apply the substrate bias, thus easing the assembly. A side disadvantage of double-sided detectors is that they do not have an active edge. Nevertheless, using a properly designed termination, the dead area at the edge can be reduced to about 100 μm.
The peculiar structure of 3D sensors with columnar electrodes penetrating all the way through the substrate enables to decouple the active thickness from the electrode distance, offering important advantages in terms of low operation voltage and high charge collection efficiency in irradiated devices. Most of the electrical properties of these sensors are indeed found to be dependent on the distance between the electrodes only, but it should be noted that surface effects are not completely negligible and can significantly affect the sensor capacitance and the breakdown voltage. This is mainly due to the surface implantations (p-spray and/or p-stop) that are used to provide an effective insulation between n+ columns. Additionally, for FBK 3D sensors, since the columnar electrodes are not filled with poly-Si, the metal contacts must be made at the sensor surface, thus requiring an extension of the doped regions around the columns, that is also found to affect the electrical characteristics.
During the R&D phase for IBL, several batches of 3D sensors have been fabricated at FBK and different options for the surface isolation implant (p-spray) and for the layout of the surface layers could be evaluated. In this paper, we will focus on the influence of the layout on the electrical characteristics of these detectors. The main design and technological issues will be reviewed, and experimental results from different sensor batches will be discussed and compared to TCAD simulations.