Qinyu Wu, Zhenqing Jia, Wenxin Wang, Zhixing Ling, Chen Zhang, Shuangnan Zhang, and Weimin Yuan March 2022, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Volume 134, Issue 1033, id.035006, 15 pp.
In recent years, the performance of Scientific Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (sCMOS) sensors has been improved significantly. Compared with charge-coupled Device sensors, sCMOS sensors have various advantages, making them potentially better devices for optical and X-ray detection, especially in time-domain astronomy. After a series of tests of sCMOS sensors, we proposed a new dedicated high-speed, large-format X-ray detector in 2016 cooperating with Gpixel Inc. This new sCMOS sensor has a physical size of 6 cm × 6 cm, with an array of 4096 × 4096 pixels and a pixel size of 15 μm. The frame rate is 20.1 fps under current condition and can be boosted to a maximum value around 100 fps. The epitaxial thickness is increased to 10 μm compared to the previous sCMOS product. We show the results of its first taped-out product in this work. The dark current of this sCMOS is lower than 10 e- pixel-1 s-1 at 20°C, and lower than 0.02 e- pixel-1 s-1 at -30°C. The fixed pattern noise and the readout noise are lower than 5 e- in high-gain situation and show a small increase at low temperature. The energy resolution reaches 180.1 eV (3.1%) at 5.90 keV for single-pixel events and 212.3 eV (3.6%) for all split events. The continuous X-ray spectrum measurement shows that this sensor is able to response to X-ray photons from 500 eV to 37 keV. The excellent performance, as demonstrated from these test results, makes sCMOS sensor an ideal detector for X-ray imaging and spectroscopic application.
