Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) technology is widely used in high-performance and low-power semiconductor devices. The SOI wafers have two layers of active silicon (Si), and normally the bottom Si layer is a mere physical structure. The idea of making intelligent pixel detectors by using the bottom Si layer as sensors for X-ray, infrared light, high-energy particles, neutrons, etc. emerged from very early days of the SOI technology. However, there have been several difficult issues with fabricating such detectors and they have not become very popular until recently.
This book offers a comprehensive overview of the basic concepts and research issues of SOI radiation image detectors. It introduces basic issues to implement the SOI detector and presents how to solve these issues. It also reveals fundamental techniques, improvement of radiation tolerance, applications, and examples of the detectors.
Since the SOI detector has both a thick sensing region and CMOS transistors in amonolithic die, many ideas have emerged to utilize this technology. This book is a good introduction for people who want to develop or use SOI detectors.
Yasuo Arai received his Ph.D. in nuclear science from Tohoku University in 1982. Since 1982, he has been working at High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (named KEK). From 1982-1986, he worked on the data acquisition system for the VENUS experiment at the electron-positron collider accelerator TRISTAN. From 1987, he has been working on the development of readout LSI for radiation detector. Especially, he has designed TDC LSIs for the ATLAS detector, which led to the discovery of Higgs particle in 2012. In 2005, he has started a new project to develop monolithic radiation image sensor by using SOI technology, and he is a leader of the SOI pixel collaboration. He is now a professor in the electronics system group of KEK.Ikuo Kurachi is a professor with High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (Japan). He holds a Ph.D. in engineering (Tokyo University of Science, Japan, 2016) and B.S. in applied physics (Tokyo University of Science, Japan, 1983). He has over 30 years of experience in semiconductor device manufacturing at OKI Electric Industry Co., Ltd. (Japan), OKI Semiconductor Co., Ltd. (Japan), and Powerchip Technology Corp. (Taiwan) where he was a leader of process integration development in DRAM, NVM, LOGIC, and sensor devices. His research interests are interface state property of Si-SiO2, MOSFET reliability, and process integration technologies. He has published over 40 articles in journals and conferences.
