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1. Starting Point: single-crystal n-doped wafer. Wafer is a very thin slice of silicon crystal which is used to produce the actual detectors.
2. Surface passivation by SiO2-layer. E.g. growing by (dry) thermal oxidation at 1030 °C.
3. Window opening using photolithography technique with etching, e.g. for strips
4. Doping using either
• Thermal diffusion (furnaceproduce a thin layer of oxide on the surface of a wafer)
• Ion implantation (introduction of dopants in a semiconductor by accelerating ions)
5. After ion implantation: Curing of damage via thermal annealing at approx. 600°C, (activation of dopant atoms by incorporation into silicon lattice)
6. Metallization of front side: sputtering or CVD (chemical vapor deposition) to produce thin film
7. Removing of excess metal by photolithography: etching of non-covered areas
8. Full-area metallization of backplane with annealing at approx. 450°C for better adherence between metal and silicon
9. Wafer dicing (cutting) [12].
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VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland has been developing strip silicon radiation detectors for many years. What is more, VTT have been closely working with CERN which conducts the most important experiments on particle physics in the world.
Wafer is a very thin slice of silicon crystal which is used to produce the actual detectors. The production line at VTT can make wafers up to 200 mm in diameter using planar technology. Furthermore, the thickness of the strip detectors is only 150 μm or 300 μm which can be implemented for different bias configurations. Area of the detectors is from 5 x 5 cm2 to 1 x 1 cm2. Interestingly, the modern fabrication techniques such as etching, planarization, lithography and bonding are applied. The most important thing is that leakage currents of the detectors are under few nanoamperes, which makes it acceptable for radiation detection. [2].
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