Speaker
Description
In the past few decades, CMOS sensors have been widely adopted in consumer applications and are now moving towards space exploration. This work presents a new monolithic CMOS sensor platform that builds upon the ARCADIA technology and will be developed in the SPACEITUP! Spoke4 project, aimed at creating low power, high-resolution sensors for the next-generation satellite missions.
At the core of this collaboration there is the focus on enhancing the performance of space-based gamma rays trackers for Compton telescopes. Thus, to ensure adequate stopping power and charge collection for high-energy photons, thick silicon sensors, on the order of 500$\mu$m, are required. ARCADIA, the starting technology, proposes Fully Depleted Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (FD-MAPS), integrating both sensor and readout electronics on the same wafer. This approach allows the reduction of material budget, simplifying the assembly and achieving high granularity, approximately $10^5$ channels per cm$^2$, needed for fine event reconstruction.
The ARCADIA project leverages commercially standard 110nm CMOS processes, specifically the LFoundry LF11is, with manufacturing based on Italian sites. FD-MAPSs collect charge mainly by drift, allowing for faster collection time and better timing resolution. This is pivotal for detecting the rapid events related to gamma-rays interactions.
The technology has already been demonstrated in system-ready full-scale CMOS FD-MAPS for particle tracking and low-energy X-ray detection featuring 400$\mu$m thick sensors. Moreover, ultra low-power architectures, optimized for space operation, have been implemented, achieving power consumption in the magnitude of 10 mW/cm$^2$. Hence, the feasibility of producing fully depleted sensors within the interested thickness range while maintaining a scalable architecture with a power-efficient design has already been demonstrated.
Beyond gamma-ray detection, the project will further explore configurable CMOS sensor concepts, widening their potential applications in astrophysics and Earth observation. Indeed, due to the scalability and adaptability of the ARCADIA platform, the boundaries of low-power, high-resolution monolithic sensors could be pushed towards the next-generation space-based detectors.