Liu, Mingjun; Wu, Qinyu; Ling, Zhixing; Zhang, Chen; Yuan, Weimin; Zhang, Shuang-Nan
March 2025, Nuclear Inst. and Methods in Physics Research, A, Volume 1072, id.170146
In recent years, complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) sensors have been demonstrated to have significant potential in X-ray astronomy, where long-term reliability is crucial for space X-ray telescopes. This study examines the long-term stability of a scientific CMOS sensor, focusing on its bias, dark current, readout noise, and X-ray spectral performance. The sensor was initially tested at ‑30 °C for 16 months, followed by accelerated aging at 20 °C. After a total aging period of 610 days, the bias map, dark current, readout noise, gain, and energy resolution exhibited no observable degradation. There are less than 50 pixels within the 4 k × 4 k array which show a decrease of the bias under 50 ms integration time by over 10 digital numbers (DNs). First-order kinetic fitting of the gain evolution predicts a gain degeneration of 0.73% over 3 years and 2.41% over 10 years. These results underscore the long-term reliability of CMOS sensors for application in space missions.
