Radiation hardness study on a CMOS pixel sensor for charged particle tracking

TL;DR

This study evaluates the radiation hardness of a CMOS pixel sensor designed for particle tracking in collider detectors, combining experimental measurements and TCAD simulations to assess performance after irradiation.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of radiation effects on enlarged CMOS pixels using both measurements and simulations, informing design choices for collider detectors.

Findings

Enlarged pixels retain satisfactory charge collection after irradiation.

Radiation causes greater performance loss in larger pixels but remains within acceptable limits.

Sensor gain calibration remains effective post-irradiation.

Abstract

A CMOS pixel sensor, named Supix-1, is developed for a pixelated silicon tracker for the Circular Electron-Positron Collider (CEPC) project. The sensor, consisted of nine sectors varying in pixel sizes, diode sizes and geometries, is fabricated with a 180 nm CMOS Image Sensor (CIS) process to study the particle detection performance of enlarged pixels. In this work, the radiation-induced effects on the charge collection of the sensor under the fluence of 1 $\times$ 10^13 1 MeV neq/cm^2 are studied by the measurements with the radioactive source of Fe-55 and the Technology Computer Aided Design (TCAD) simulations, since the radiation hardness of 6.8 $\times$ 10^12 1 MeV neq/cm^2 per year for Non-Ionizing Energy Loss (NIEL) effects is required. In measurements, the sensor gain has been calibrated using the k-$\alpha$ peak of Fe-55 before and after irradiation. The pixel-wise equivalent noise charge (ENC), charge collection efficiency (CCE) and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) were evaluated. The radiation-induced effects on cluster properties are studied through a self-developed reconstruction algorithm. In TCAD simulations, charge collections in 5 $\times$ 5 pixel matrixes for two typical impinging cases of incident particles were simulated with and without irradiation. Both measurements and simulations indicate that enlarged pixels with area of 21 $\mu$m $\times$ 84 $\mu$m, though suffering greater loss on sensor performance than small pixels do, still have satisfactory noise and charge collection performance after irradiation for particle tracking in the upcoming collider detectors.